Archive for category: #Imperialism #Multipolar

Isn’t it time for the major military powers to give up the notion that their war criminals should be allowed to operate with impunity?

A peculiar cognitive dissonance seems to have taken hold in the world. The Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—led and propped up by the United States—has reminded the world that the international order is, if anything, more dependent on American military, economic, and financial might now than only a few years ago. Yet everywhere you turn, there is a sense that the U.S. is in some form of terminal decline; too divided, incoherent, violent, and dysfunctional to sustain its Pax Americana. Moscow and Beijing seem to think that the great American unwinding has already begun, while in Europe, officials worry about a sudden American collapse. “Do we talk about it?” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria who remains well connected within Europe’s diplomatic network, told me, somewhat indignantly, after I asked whether an American implosion was ever discussed at the highest levels of government. “We never stop talking about it.”

Again and again, when I spoke with officials, diplomats, politicians, and aides in Britain and Europe over the past few weeks, the same message came back. “It’s weighing on people’s minds, big time,” one senior European Union official told me, speaking, like most of those I interviewed, on condition of anonymity to freely discuss their concerns. From outside the U.S., many now see in America only relentless mass shootings, political dysfunction, social division, and the looming presence of Donald Trump. All of this seems to add up in the collective imagination to an impression of a country on the brink, meeting all the conditions for a descent into civil unrest.

[Read: Why Britain changed its China stance]

Many Europeans have long considered American decline an inevitability and have looked to prepare themselves for such an eventuality. Pushed by Germany and France, the EU has sought out trade and energy deals with rival global powers, including Russia and China. The idea was that as the U.S. disengaged from Europe, the EU would step up.

But then Russia invaded Ukraine, and everything changed. Suddenly, Europe’s grand strategy was in tatters, and American strength seemed to reassert itself. Europe discovered it had not become more independent from the U.S. but more dependent on it. In fact, Europe was dependent on everyone: Russia for its energy, China for its trade, America for its security. In pursuing a slow, cautious disengagement from the U.S., Europe found itself in the worst of all worlds. And in a desperate bid to reverse out of the mess, it was forced to rush back into the arms of the very leviathan it fears might be not only slowly losing its power but in danger of suddenly imploding.

This, then, is the difficult situation of America’s protectorates today. Worried about the decline of the U.S., much of the American-led world has clung even more tightly to Washington than before. In Asia, the U.S. remains the only power capable of balancing against China’s bid for regional hegemony. In Europe, something similar is true with regard to Russia. To the continent’s eternal shame, as one senior British official told me, the apparently divided, dysfunctional, and declining power of the U.S. has still managed to send drastically more lethal aid to save a European democracy than any other NATO power.

Such is America’s continuing dominance, in fact, that the world’s fixation on the idea of its impending demise seems both a dramatic overreaction and a dramatic underreaction. The depth of America’s military-industrial complex and the scale of its imperial bureaucracy mean that they are simply too heavy for a single president or Congress to remove in one go. To an extraordinary degree, American power has been vaccinated against its own political dysfunction, as Trump’s time in office showed.

And yet the very weight of this Pax Americana means that if the vaccine ever stopped working, the consequences would be globally historic. In Poland and Japan, Taiwan and Ukraine, the very basis of the world order today rests on American supremacy. But besides talking about the fragility of these foundations, no one is actually doing anything to secure them.

Russia’s invasion has revealed the extent of Europe’s weakness, but this very weakness means that for most countries on the continent, the only rational thing to do is to avoid anything that might undermine American commitment. This, in turn, further increases Europe’s dependence on the U.S., and further entrenches the continent’s weakness, resulting in a vicious circle. “Ukraine has made it easier to read the writing on the wall,” as one senior EU official put it to me. “But it has also made it harder to do anything about it.”

In the five months since Vladimir Putin’s attempted colonization of Ukraine, two more European countries, Sweden and Finland, have joined NATO, the American-led military alliance that guarantees European security. NATO has also moved to make sure that it remains relevant in Washington by listing China for the first time as a security threat. What’s more, since February, the U.S. has increased its military presence on the continent, and Europe has started importing American gas. Meanwhile, the EU’s proposed trade pact with China shows no sign of waking from its political coma, Britain has distanced itself from Beijing, and the G7 group of advanced economies has reemerged as the primary international forum for the Western world to coordinate its efforts. The euro has fallen so far in its value that it has reached parity with the dollar, French President Emmanuel Macron has lost his majority to govern, Mario Draghi’s government in Rome collapsed, Boris Johnson is on his way out, and Germany faces a winter of discontent with energy shortages.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘If Macron loses, Putin wins’]

Yet Europe is divided on the question of how it gets itself out of this mess, split between those who think the American order is the best and only hope, and those who see themselves as continental Cassandras, warning of the catastrophe but unable to persuade anyone to do anything about it.

Quietly, the EU is working on building European resilience in case of a sudden—or not so sudden—American unwinding. The bloc’s officials are developing a variety of measures, including creating a “European cloud,” a European semiconductor industry, European energy networks, and European military-industrial capacity. Officials I spoke with even talked about European moves into the Indo-Pacific region to help protect the current order should American efforts begin to falter.

Some of this seems sensible, some fantastical—and some dangerous. Attempts to produce a specifically European military-industrial capacity, for example, often just mean protectionism and making things harder for American defense firms trying to supply European militaries. Trump need not be president for one to foresee a political problem emerging if Europe were to continue to ask for billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to protect its borders while erecting barriers to American companies. Notions about the EU—unable even to protect its neighbors—stepping into even the mildest vacuum created by an American lack of interest in the Indo-Pacific are utterly ludicrous.

Despite this, there is an understanding within the EU about its own weakness. One official I spoke with, for example, said that building European autonomy was made harder not just by countries such as Hungary, with close ties to Moscow, but by “German irrationality,” which many now see as Europe’s real Achilles’ heel. Berlin doesn’t seem to want anything other than a world of open markets to sell its products. If this means dependence on other countries for security, energy, or other things, then so be it. Today, it is hard to see the unity of political will across the continent required to fundamentally change things.

For some in Britain, European panic about a U.S. withdrawal or collapse is little more than an avoidance technique, allowing officials to point to America while masking their own domestic shortcomings. “American decline is Europe’s comforting fantasy,” one senior U.K. official told me. “It’s a convenient way to avoid making any decisions of their own.”

Perhaps this is the source of Europe’s real panic: that it is becoming irrelevant. As Macron has warned, Europe’s real future may well be less that of a great power in a multipolar world than a geopolitical backwater, unable to develop its own autonomy, but also more and more inconsequential to the great battle for supremacy between the U.S. and China, in which it must play only a supporting role, forever America’s junior partner. No matter how civilized Europe remains, no matter how peaceful and liberal, it will be a place of secondary importance.

In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated 60 years on the throne with a diamond jubilee that represented the high-water mark of Britain’s imperial power. The tribune of empire, Rudyard Kipling, composed two poems for the occasion. Instead of “The White Man’s Burden,” which he ultimately dedicated to America’s colonization of the Philippines two years later, Kipling published “Recessional,” which hit on a different note entirely—about the pride that comes before a fall.

Written in the style of a prayer, “Recessional” pleads with the Almighty—the “God of our fathers, known of old”—not to abandon Britain. “Be with us yet,” Kipling urges the “Lord of our far-flung battle-line, beneath whose awful Hand we hold dominion over palm and pine.” Kipling then adds his famous line: “Lest we forget—lest we forget!” The prayer is a warning to those celebrating Britain’s imperial supremacy that it could be taken away at any moment: Lest we forget! “Far-called; our navies melt away,” Kipling cautions. “On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

[Read: America’s necessary myth for the world]

At the height of Britain’s global power, he warned that such things are fleeting and precarious. The poem caused a sensation, cementing Kipling’s place as the poet of empire, but also the prophet of its decline. Some 125 years later, the world is obsessing about the collapse of the new imperium.

The sense of foreboding now seems diffuse, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, not encapsulated in a single poem but out there nonetheless, in hushed diplomatic conversations happening all over Europe (as well as the regular Macron sermons), books, and even in the background of Hollywood movies.

With Russia being held at bay in the Donbas, China being cautioned against invading Taiwan, and the dollar supreme, the American order today looks dominant. And yet, lest we forget.

The danger is surely that everything can be true at the same time. The U.S. remains extraordinarily powerful, but that does not mean its domestic dysfunction and violent social upheavals are irrelevant, incapable of distracting it from ordering the world.

America today is both mightier than it was a decade ago and more vulnerable; the guarantor of the world order and the greatest potential source of its disorder. And as long as that is the case, diplomats, officials, politicians, and the general public outside America are going to both obsess about its collapse—whether out of genuine fear or hallucinatory projection—and be unable to do anything about it.

A Pro-China supporter tears a U.S. flag during a protest against Nancy Pelosi on Aug. 3, 2022. | Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

The US-China relationship will continue to deteriorate.

China took several aggressive actions this weekend after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, including firing ballistic missiles in Taiwan’s vicinity and sanctioning Pelosi. While the incident may not lead to all-out war, it’s a further step in the dissolution of the relationship between the US and China — and it gives China’s military the training it needs to execute future attacks.

Pelosi is the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since former Speaker Newt Gingrich went in 1997. In the 25 years since, China has grown both its economy and military exponentially. Along with that has come the nation’s desire — and increased capability — to lay claim to Taiwan. Taiwan, which governs itself independently of Beijing under current President Tsai Ing-wen, has increasingly chafed at Beijing’s tactics to “reunify” Taiwan with mainland China.

Now, the US is hoping to avoid a diplomatic and possibly military crisis with China. The relationship between the two superpowers has rapidly deteriorated in recent years over a plethora of problems like the abuse of Uyghur minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), crackdowns on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, increased coordination between the US and Taiwan under the Trump administration, and alleged espionage and hacking on the part of the Chinese government.

“There is much to object to in the Chinese behavior, but that said, there are many behaviors that the Chinese object to, that the various stakeholders in the US simply ignore and blow past, and perhaps do so at their peril,” Daniel Russel, vice president of international security and diplomacy at the Asia Institute Policy Institute, told Vox.

Previous administrations practiced “strategic ambiguity,” seeking to reassure Taiwan without inflaming China. In May, Biden pledged that the US would go above and beyond the support it’s already provided for Ukraine should China invade Taiwan, though members of his administration including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin insisted that Biden’s statement was in line with the One China policy — the official acknowledgement that the mainland is China and Beijing is the seat of power.

Now, China is conducting large-scale military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, reportedly firing 11 ballistic missiles in the island’s vicinity, Reuters reported Thursday. That’s the first time China has made such a move since 1996 — showing how much has changed since the last time the US and China faced off over Taiwan.

“[The Chinese military is] probably not even halfway through the various things that they have in mind,” Russel told Vox. “I think it’s pretty clear that the Chinese are in the acting out phase, the retaliatory phase, as they characterize it, and they have no interest in being calmed down until they have completed this circuit of punitive measures.”

The ultimate goal, at least when it comes to Taiwan, is not necessarily a military takeover — China is not yet capable of that, Russel said. Instead, every crisis is calibrated “to force Taiwan, essentially, to its knees, to force the leadership of Taiwan to capitulate to the mainland’s terms for political negotiation.”

China’s military might has grown considerably in the past three decades

China has become more aggressive in defending what it sees as its interests in several arenas, including militarily in the South China Sea and with hostile crackdowns against pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong — both of which represent a threat to Taiwan’s democratic system.

China claimed sovereignty over the South China Sea and several islands in the vicinity, including Taiwan, in 1992’s Law on the Territorial Sea. That document also outlines the conditions under which military vessels and aircraft may enter into Chinese territory. Now, 30 years later, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has the means to enforce its sovereignty, and has been doing so with increasingly provocative maritime action, including militarizing islands in the South China Sea

The US maintains that it has significant economic and security interests in the region and routinely conducts freedom of navigation and other exercises there, utilizing military sea and airpower to maintain the freedom of maritime areas. The US also sells weapons systems to Taiwan for defensive purposes per the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, but those capabilities just aren’t in proportion to what China’s military has produced over the past 25 years. Furthermore, as recently as last year both US and Taiwanese stakeholders expressed concern that Taiwan’s military suffered from low morale and readiness among reservists and conscripts. That’s due in part to a lack of funding and a disorganized reserve system, as well as the belief of many Taiwanese that the US will support their military should any major attack occur, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation from last October.

China’s military growth is currently based on civil-military integration, which includes major investments in tech research and development and dual-purpose technology which aims to strengthen both the military and economy. That has resulted in significant weapons systems developments, including the so-called “carrier killer” missile which can reportedly attack ships as large as contemporary US aircraft carriers, thus potentially deterring US warships from operating in what China considers its own territory.

The situation is a far cry from the 1995-1996 crisis in the Taiwan Strait, when a visit by Lee Teng-hui, who would become Taiwan’s first democratically-elected president in 1996, to his alma mater Cornell University, sparked tensions between the US and China. China then deployed missiles and conducted military exercises in Taiwan’s vicinity, but the US was able to fend off those provocations by sending two aircraft carrier groups transiting through the Taiwan Strait.

Since suffering that humiliation, the Chinese government has pushed to create a military capable of facing — and beating — the US in a confrontation. What the People’s Liberation Army is missing is experience in the war zone, Russel told Vox. “They’re practicing, and that is not a good thing for us,” he said. “And it’s the sort of thing that directly remedies the biggest shortcoming of the People’s Liberation Army — namely, that unlike the US military, they haven’t spent the last 50 years at war.” Therefore, Pelosi’s visit was the perfect excuse to gain battlefield experience in the ideal context.

“The Chinese are taking advantage of what they are billing as a provocation,” Russel said. “They’re taking advantage of this to practice things that, in normal circumstances, would be so provocative that they didn’t dare rehearse. So these are joint exercises that are, in effect, dry runs for a military action against Taiwan — whether it’s a blockade, or an attack of another sort.”

Is there a diplomatic solution to the crisis?

There’s no reason to believe that China will launch an all-out amphibious assault on Taiwan at this point, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t currently serious risks.

“In terms of lowering the tension, rule number one: Don’t do anything that makes things worse,” Russel said. But that’s easier said than done when diplomatic relationships that would normally serve to diffuse such tensions are frayed, as they are now. The White House summoned Chinese ambassador Qin Gang on Friday to rebuke him for the military exercises; now, China has called off discussions on other critical topics and its military officials are not responding to the Pentagon’s overtures — increasing the potential for accidents and misinterpretations to spiral out of control.

“You’ve got a lot of US, PRC, and Taiwan assets moving around, in a relatively confined space. In the past there have been accidents where maybe overzealous or inexperienced Chinese pilots have collided with US planes — even much more recently there have been many more examples of very risky maneuvers by Chinese pilots and Chinese ship captains,” Russel said. “So that danger is a real one, and what makes it dangerous is not that a US plane and a Chinese plane could get in an accident, but that the US and China don’t have the mechanisms in place — the relationships, the dialogues, et cetera — that serve to block escalation, to prevent an incident from becoming a crisis, and a crisis leading to conflict.”

A complicating factor seems to be Chinese President Xi Jinping’s need to show force to shore up his power ahead of China’s 20th Party Congress later this year, where major leadership changes will be announced. Michael Raska, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told Bloomberg that China’s exercises in the Taiwan Strait are “a show of force that solidifies Xi’s political power at home and paves way for his third-term re-election.”

It’s also a distraction from the fact that “things are going to hell in a hand basket in Xi Jinping’s China,” Russel said. Between limits on technology use, overbearing social control, and major economic issues like a severe housing crisis, Chinese citizens are ridiculing the government’s policies on the social network Weibo — giving Xi every reason to dial up the pressure on Taiwan and the US, Russel said.

China also announced that it would not continue talks with US officials on climate change, one area where the US and China had willingly cooperated until Pelosi’s trip. “Each time there is an event that makes tensions between Washington and Beijing surge, as Nancy Pelosi‘s visit has done, [it] leaves the relationship, when it does calm down, that much worse,” Russel said, noting that Taiwan is not the only issue over which the US and China must negotiate.

“It makes the prospects for of any kind of real progress — not negotiating the fate of Taiwan, but the two major powers on planet Earth learning how to share the globe without blowing it up — makes that mission all the more difficult.”

Mercenary group does not officially exist but is playing a more public role and openly recruiting in Russia

• Russia-Ukraine war – latest updates

Three billboards in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg shine a light on what was once one of Russia’s most shadowy organisations, the private military contractor Wagner.

“Motherland, Honour, Blood, Bravery. WAGNER”, one of the posters reads.

Continue reading…

“Postcolonial,” “decolonial,” and “coloniality of power” — these are some of the terms that flooded debates in academia and on the Left in the decades of the neoliberal boom. After the shock of the capitalist crisis of 2008, and with the return of some debates regarding global capitalism and imperialism, criticisms of postcolonial thinking have been reactivated.¹See, for example, Enrique de la Garza Toledo (ed.), Crítica de la razón neocolonial [Critique of Neocolonial Reason] (Buenos Aires: CLACSO/CEIL CONICET/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 2021). The book is a collection of interesting critical essays on decoloniality, particularly its Latin American variant. This article addresses some of them, especially Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism — both its strengths and its limitations.²Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2013). A Spanish edition of the book was published in 2021. See Vivek Chibber, La teoría postcolonial y el espectro del capital, translated by José Maria Amoroto Salido (Tres Canto, Spain: Akal, 2021).

First, though, we must explore what “postcolonial” means and why it has become such a “unique way of thinking” among many intellectuals of the so-called “Global South.” Is it a unified theory or a set of heterogeneous critical perspectives? And what should we make of its onslaught against Marxism?

Postcolonial, as the word’s prefix indicates, is a specific variant of the rise of post- in academia. Terry Eagleton once noted that postcolonialism was the foreign relations department of postmodernism.³Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism,” New Left Review I/152, July/August 1985.Postcolonial studies, which has grown in influence since its beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, has drawn on authors such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as its proponents have intervened on the intellectual terrain. It is a poststructuralist matrix for thinking about the relationship between center and peripheries, as well as between capitalism and racism/colonialism.

Genesis of Postcolonial Criticism

The origins of postcolonialism can be traced to the emergence of the Subaltern Studies Group of Indian intellectuals, and the series Subaltern Studies published annually since 1982. Combining a culturalist reading of Antonio Gramsci with notions of Foucaultian and Derridean textualist deconstruction, they set out to intervene in Indian historiography. However, it would be wrong to attribute to this current alone the more pluralistic beginnings of postcolonialism. In those same years, intellectuals of color from the Asian, African, and Caribbean diaspora were engaged in a prolific ideological production in the English-speaking world, especially in literature departments.

As an antecedent, Stuart Hall carried out his own Gramscian reading oriented towards post-Marxism, which had several points of contact with Ernesto Laclau’s work.⁴See Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); it is a compilation of Hall’s lectures that year on Althusser, Gramsci, and poststructuralism. See also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001); it was originally published in 1985. The notions of articulation and hegemony found in Hall’s work, together with those of hybridity and diaspora, are a precedent for what became the idea of postcolonialism (although Hall remained more anchored in a certain cultural Marxism).

Then there are the works of so-called “Black Marxism” or Black radicalism, which advanced further with a more general critique of Marxism — as in the work of Cedric Robinson, with his definition of “racial capitalism” and call to “decolonize Marxism.”⁵Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London, UK: Zed Press, 1983). 

Finally, in Latin America, what is known as decolonization was imposed, especially since the 1990s with the formation of the “modernity/coloniality” group, composed of several Latin American intellectuals who taught in the United States.⁶Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Walter Mignolo are among the best known. Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power is characteristic of this trend, which from the beginning had markedly postmodern features. Some authors emphasize the differences between postcolonial and decolonial, while others present them as nuanced variants of the same logic.

Postcolonial or decolonial feminism developed its own concepts and has extended in important ways all the way to the present, with the work of Chicana, Latin American, Indigenous, Asian, and African authors who took aim against what they defined as white, Eurocentric feminism. They include María Lugones, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

It should be noted that the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 stands as a fundamental antecedent to all these currents.⁷Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (New York: Pantheon, 1978). His sharp critiques of Eurocentrism, tracing the construction of the Oriental “other” in the great classics of Western literature and philosophy, was paradigmatic for the new postcolonial thought. Said included Marxism in his critiques of Eurocentrism, something that was also taken up by later currents.

More broadly, postcolonial theories converged on certain common conceptions, themes related to the periphery (and peripheries), and reflections on racism and gender in postcolonial societies.⁸Here the term “postcolonial” does not allude to the theoretical current, but to the historical and social process of “decolonization” from India’s independence in 1947 to the processes of national independence on the African continent in the decades that followed. In the case of postcolonial studies in Latin America, however, the chronological references emphasize the schism of the conquest of America and colonialism-coloniality from 1492 onwards. It constitutes a general critique of “Western reason” and a questioning of Marxism for its “blindness” to the colonial or racial question.⁹This is a topic on which I have written more extensively elsewhere. See Josefína L. Martinez, “Racism, Capitalism, and Class Struggle,” Left Voice, June 9, 2020. These affinities required a set of theoretical shifts as part of taking the “cultural turn”: the focus on cultural and ideological phenomena, and the abandonment of the centrality of class, in the face of the emergence of the “subaltern” or new social movements. More generally, it substituted an intellectual practice of deconstructing the “Western and Eurocentric episteme” for the anti-imperialist critique (to which I return later).

In this article, beyond the more general elements about postcoloniality, the focus is on the production of the Subaltern Studies group. This allows for addressing the shift from Marxist categories toward a postcolonial reading and dealing with some specific criticisms that this current has raised.

Gramsci in Bengal

The Subaltern Studies group in India was formed around Ranajit Guha, who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1959.¹⁰Various authors have written that Guha and the group of young intellectuals had been influenced by the Maoist-inspired Naxalite peasant rebellion and later by the openly repressive course of Indira Gandhi’s government and the Congress Party beginning in the mid-1970s. Other well-known intellectuals in the group include Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyan Prakash. Postcolonial feminist philosopher Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remained very close to them, although without adhering to all their assumptions.

Guha was key to the appropriation of Gramsci, reconfiguring the concepts of “subaltern classes” and “hegemony” for a new reading of Indian history. It was not a reflection on the hegemonic capacity of the working class in alliance with the peasantry — something at the very core of Gramscian concern — but an analysis of the self-activity of subaltern subjects, especially the peasantry. It was a reflection that could be maintained within the terms of a more classical populism or Maoism, which considers the peasantry to be the basis for “popular” or “national” movements of a populist-front type.¹¹Guha had been a member of the Communist Party, breaking with it after the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Later, before his post-Marxist drift, he had affinity with Maoism, although he was not a militant in an organization. Guha, however, went even further, toward a sort of post-Maoism. His reflection on peasant rebellions led him to formulate the existence of an autonomous peasant consciousness, irreducible to Western categories and to the “universal” tendencies of capital. It was then that subaltern studies took a step towards postcolonialism.

Guha argued against the idea that the peasants had deployed a “pre-political” or “purely spontaneous” activity,¹²The polemic is directed centrally at Eric Hobsbawm’s conceptions. although he recognizes that these rebellions often failed to overcome “localism, sectarianism, and ethnic divisions.” The initial objective of subaltern studies was to “rehabilitate” the peasant “subject” forgotten by liberal and nationalist historiography.¹³Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983). Guha sets out to read the sources (official documents, colonial reports, etc.) against their grain in order to find evidence of this rebellious consciousness. To do so, “we must take the peasant-rebel’s awareness of his own world and his will to change it as our point of departure.”

For his part, Dipesh Chakrabarty focuses not so much on subaltern subjects, but on “subaltern pasts.” ¹⁴Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). These subaltern pasts “break historicization” because there the spiritual, sacred, ethnic, and caste relations take place, which populate a world that becomes incommensurable from the logic of Western reason. For Chakrabarty:

This is another time that, theoretically, could be entirely immeasurable in terms of the godless, spiritless time of what we call “history,” an idea already assumed in the secular concepts of “capital” and “abstract labor.”¹⁵Ibid., 93.

So the subaltern, in subaltern studies, is a notion that differs from both nationalist and liberal historiographies, as well as from Marxism.

In a related argument, Guha puts forward the idea of the existence of two separate spheres, the subaltern and that of the politics of the nationalist elites — something that expresses “the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation,”¹⁶Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism, ed. by Supriya Nair (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2005), 406. or the failure to integrate the subaltern strata into its hegemony. From his point of view, the central problem of the new Indian historiography is the “study of this historical failure of the nation to come to its own — a failure that he attributes to both the bourgeoisie and the working class.¹⁷Ibid., 407. Although it is not the focus of his argument, at one point Guha points out that “the working class was still not sufficiently mature in the objective conditions of its social being and in its consciousness as a class-for-itself, nor was it yet firmly allied to the peasantry.” Thus, “it could do nothing to take over and complete the mission which the bourgeoisie had failed to realize.” Guha points out that modernity in India showed that capital failed, historically, to realize its universalizing tendency under colonial conditions, which in turn led to its failure to crush native South Asian culture or completely assimilate it. He calls this phenomenon “dominance without hegemony,” a characteristic he finds in both the colonial period and the nationalist experience. Now, what would be the causes of this frustration?

Guha tackles the problem in Dominance without Hegemony.¹⁸Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. The book has very interesting chapters, such as the one devoted to British colonial rule in India. There he points out that the construction of the state, promoted from above by British colonialism together with the local elites, relied above all on coercion to maintain/impose forms of forced labor of a quasi-servile type and the crushing of all resistance. The native bourgeoisie was born subordinate to colonialism, and strongly hierarchical pre-capitalist social relations, such as caste and patriarchal relations, were preserved or reconfigured. Guha points to the historical engagement of the native bourgeoisie with the landlords and the “complicity with many forms of feudal oppression,”[Ibid., 132.]] as well as the fact that Indian industrialists identified workers’ mobilization (especially after the Russian Revolution) as a threat to their class interests. In the chapter on the nationalist movement, Guha points out that Gandhi set out to discipline the entire initiative of the peasant masses, to regiment and control them. To this end, he encouraged Congress Party militants to act as “people’s policemen”¹⁹Ibid., 145. and called for demobilization after each cycle of the movement’s rise.

These reflections regarding the historically subordinated role of the native bourgeoisie and the limits of the nationalist movement point to key elements for thinking about the problem. However, once raised, they neither become a continuous thread in the book nor more generally in the elaborations published in Subaltern Studies. Rather, they came to revolve around a different hypothesis: that the historical failure of Indian nationalism originated in the impossibility of the nationalist elites to incorporate subaltern subjectivity into a unified national project, within the frameworks of the rational categories of the West.

Chakrabarty, for his part, challenges the idea that “[Indian] capitalism or political modernity has remained ‘incomplete’” and points out that India’s “history of political modernity could not be written as a simple application of the analytics of capital and nationalism available in Western Marxism.”²⁰Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 15. It would be a capitalism without hegemonic bourgeois relations, following Guha’s formulations. Chakrabarty’s proposal is to “provincialize” Europe so that European thought can “be renewed from and for the margins”²¹Ibid., 16. — recovering a thought “tied to places and to particular forms of life,”²²Ibid., 18. necessarily fragmentary.²³Chakrabarty states that his intention is to bring Marx and Heidegger into dialogue in the context of the study of modernity in India. This line of reflection on the marginal, the fragmentary. and the locally situated would mark the evolution of subaltern studies, in which textualist tendencies became increasingly strong.

One of Spivak’s first interventions in the debate on subalternity was her well-known text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It opens with a polemic with Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The author challenges both authors for not taking into account the relationship between power-knowledge structures and the constitution of Europe as a colonial power. The central thesis of her essay is that the subalterns are those who cannot “speak” for themselves and, therefore, their history cannot be written. In her words, “the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”²⁴G.C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Die Philosophin 14, no. 27 (1988). Here Spivak radicalizes the group’s initial approach, noting as “strategic essentialism” the claim to recover the consciousness of the subaltern. As a postcolonial feminist, Spivak notes further that subalternity is found more than anything else in the “paradigmatic victims” of the international division of labor, the women of the urban “subproletariat,” and in informal labor, as well as in those belonging to the unorganized layers of rural labor.

As a general trend, the subalternist group was, by the 1990s, acquiring a language and reflections increasingly akin to postmodernism, focusing on the reading of literary sources and other textual resources. But, as already indicated, this was only one of the strands of postcolonial reason. Let us now consider, on a more general level, some of the criticisms that have been made of postcoloniality.

Critiques of Postcolonial Reason

Postcolonialists share with other intellectuals the conviction that the emancipatory projects of the 20th century — the rebellions, uprisings, workers’ and peasants’ insurrections, and struggles for socialism — do not offer a strategic perspective for today. They question the “metanarratives of emancipation,” among which they include bourgeois nationalism and Marxism (although they do not question capitalist social relations with the same radicalism, even in the heyday of neoliberalism). This is what Aijaz Ahmad called the “‘post-’condition.”²⁵Aijaz Ahmad, “ “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Post’-Condition,” Socialist Register 33 (1997). It is an “intellectual style” marked by the rejection of “universalist” ideas such as emancipation, equality, freedom, socialism, and communism, since for postcolonialists, these are synonymous with Eurocentrism, colonialism, and totalitarianism. They also share with poststructuralists their fascination with the fragmentary, the episodic, and the difference, as well as the substitution of an anti-systemic political practice for a deconstructive textual practice.

Ahmad points out that the postcolonial dissolves the difference between literature and history, as well as between literature and philosophy, prioritizing rhetorical criticism. He also notes that the postcolonial “dissolve[s] all enduring questions of imperialism and anti-imperialism into an infinite play of heterogeneity and contingency.” The postcolonialists question Marxism for supposedly making use of abstract and totalizing categories that do not account for the particular and contingent. And they define “Western reason” in a way that abstracts it from all historical determination.

Several authors have criticized postcolonialism for affirming a “backwards essentialism” in which the spatial location of a thinker or the geographical origin of a current of thought would determine its “Eurocentric” and “colonialist” condition. It is a geographical and ethnicist determinism that also constructs the false idea of a unique “Western episteme,” denying the complex and multiple theoretical, cultural, and social disputes that have taken place within it in different periods.²⁶Ariel Petruccelli, “Teoría y práctica decolonial: un examen crítico” [Decolonial Theory and Practice: A Critical Examination], Políticas de la Memoria (2020): 45–62. 

On the one hand, these authors reject the “Western” categories of Marxism, such as working class, revolution, and socialism, because they do not allow them to account for the “incommensurability” of the colonial and postcolonial world. At the same time, they translate for their own purposes the highlights of French poststructuralism, as part of the idealist heritage of Western philosophy. The identification of secularism with colonialism or Eurocentrism is especially problematic, as if secular thought, science, and rationality had to be flatly rejected simply because they had emanated historically from Western European countries. The rejection en bloc of all the elements of modernity can lead only to variants of conservatism, in the precise sense of the word as that which seeks a return to millenarian or religious ways of thinking.

Finally, most postcolonialists counterpose modernity and coloniality with vindication for “other ways of being in the world” such as millenarian peasant communities. But they omit that in many of these pre-capitalist societies, there were also brutal forms of oppression of women, caste hierarchies, inter-ethnic violence, slavery, and other forms of social subjugation.

Critique of Postcoloniality: The Universal and the Particular

In his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Vivek Chibber takes up several of these critiques of postcoloniality, although he focuses his polemic on the work published in Subaltern Studies. The book provoked intense debate at the time of its publication, and it is worth dwelling a bit more extensively on his arguments.

Chibber points out what he considers to be the main theses of subalternist historiography: 1) the idea of a non-hegemonic bourgeoisie; 2) derailing the universalizing impulse of capital in the East; 3) the pluralization of power; 4) the idea of two separate spheres, the elites and the subalterns; 5) the failure of nationalism as a result of adhering to Western reasoning about modernization; and 6) the Eurocentrism of social theories, including Marxism. From this, he questions the emphasis placed on the difference between the West and the East by subalternists. He argues that they romanticize bourgeois revolutions, giving to past European bourgeoisies a “universalizing” role that they never really had precisely because the defense of their own class interests would always have been paramount. In this sense, Chibber argues against the idea that the bourgeoisie ever represented anything like the interests of the “nation as a whole.” In doing so, he takes aim at what appears to be an idealization of bourgeois revolutions and liberal democracies by postcolonialists.

At the same time, Chibber ends up undervaluing the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie against the old order in the French Revolution of 1789. He thus erases the differences between that historical moment and the one that opened up after 1848, when Marx drew conclusions about the German bourgeoisie’s defection from its own national cause. After Marx, this became key to considering the question of whether national bourgeoisies could lead bourgeois revolutions in “backward” countries or those with later capitalist development. It is a subject that came to be central in the works of Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci, no less.

Chibber also questions the differentiation between forms of domination with and without hegemony, as postulated by the subalternists. He points out that in the West there is also repression, violence, and forms of interpersonal domination, so there would be no reason to establish a fundamental difference. He rejects the subalternist thesis regarding hegemony, but at the same time seems to rule out the entirety of Gramsci’s reflections on the matter. The Italian Marxist’s elaborations on the differences between East and West in the relationship between state and civil society have no place in his book.²⁷On Gramsci’s thought regarding hegemony, see Juan Dal Maso, El marxismo de Gramsci [The Marxism of Gramsci] (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento Socialista, 2016.

Finally, Chibber argues that the subalternists are wrong on the question of “the derailment of capital’s universalizing drive”²⁸Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, 36. in the East. The reason for their mistake, he says, is that they take as a measure of “universalization” the degree of implantation of liberal institutions. He challenges that this is necessary to prove the universalization of capital. Thus, we see that, according to Chibber, “The main thrust of Subaltern Studies is to stress difference.”²⁹Ibid., 52, emphasis in original. This vast difference between the West and the East would imply that “we need to construct entirely new theoretical frameworks.”³⁰Ibid., 290.

Chibber argues “that the claims for a fundamental differences with regard to capital, power, and agency are all irredeemably flawed.”³¹Ibid., 54. His conclusion is that, rather than being a radical theory, postcolonial studies is a “failure” as a critical theory because “its theorists cannot formulate a critique of globalizing capitalism if their theorization of its basic properties is mistaken.”[Ibid., 58.]]

I generally agree with this conclusion, in the sense that postcolonial studies do not pass the test as critical theory, and much less has it “surpassed” Marxism. Chibber’s arguments, though, have major problems. Whereas subalternists argue that there is an unbridgeable, incommensurable gap between East and West, Chibber challenges that idea in an entirely one-sided way. Where subalternists tend to see only vast differences, Chibber highlights structural commonalities. While he seeks to distance himself from the idea that Marxism homogenizes differences, he underestimates all the concrete differences in social formations and the unequal character of capitalist expansion on a global level. He even goes so far as to write, “No gulf separates the rise of the European bourgeoisie from that of its Indian descendants.”³²Ibid., 222. It is an affirmation that greatly simplifies the historical process and does not allow him to see the particulars of uneven development, in relation to the capitalist totality in the epoch of imperialism. The word imperialism is, in fact, difficult to find in Chibber’s book, except in a secondary reference to Lenin’s work. 

This is something into which we will delve deeper since it has important strategic consequences. First, though, let’s explore another of his arguments.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is the one devoted to the question of abstract labor. There, Chibber notes, “Postcolonial theorists have fastened onto Marx’s concept of abstract labor as a prime example of the deficiencies of universalizing theories.”³³Ibid., 264. He responds to this as follows:

Far from blinding us to the heterogeneity of the working class, or being unable to accommodate the persistence of caste-based, ethnic, or racial divisions within it, the concept of abstract labor powerfully illuminates these very phenomena.³⁴Ibid.

Chibber correctly points out that postcolonial theory has equated the notion of “abstract labor” with the idea of “homogeneous labor,” as if Marx considered that the automatic movement of capital’s expansion was erasing all differentiation of gender, race, or other hierarchies of oppression. Chibber argues that attributing this to Marx is mistaken, since “capital can reproduce social hierarchies just as readily as it can dissolve them.”³⁵Ibid., 288–89. And while, under certain conditions, it tends toward greater homogenization, in other cases “the [capitalist] system is equally capable of reproducing, and even solidifying, existing forms of social domination or differentiation.”³⁶Ibid., 289. He completes this argument with the idea that there are two “universalizing” tendencies:

The first is the universalizing drive capital which has operated in the East as well as the West, albeit at different tempos and unevenly. The second is the universal interest of the subaltern classes to defend their wellbeing against capital’s domination, inasmuch as the need for physical wellbeing is not merely specific to a particular culture or region.³⁷Ibid., 396, emphasis in original.

Here again, Chibber responds to the postcolonial critique with a simplifying schema: Does the “universal interest of the subaltern classes to defend their wellbeing” counteract, in and of itself, differences of caste, gender, or race? The argument brushes aside, with the stroke of a pen, the full complexity of this question, which is not only a “historical” problem but a key strategic question for the working class in today’s world. The reality is that the “universal interest of the subaltern classes” does not automatically transform itself into class unity, above the divisions imposed by capital, but rather that this is a political, strategic task.

Finally, Chibber argues that:

The core problem with which we have been grappling in this book is how the history of the non-West has been affected by the incursion of capitalism. Marxism is known for claiming that once capitalism becomes the organizing principle in a social formation, its historical development is centrally shaped by capitalist imperatives. The particulars of this argument may vary.³⁸Ibid., 422.

To say that capitalist imperatives hold sway despite that “the particulars of this argument may vary” misses, again, some of the main strategic polemics in Marxism. The debates that occupied the famous exchange between Marx and Vera Zasulich concerning the Russian rural commune pass through here,³⁹Translator’s note: Vera J. Zasulich (1851–1919) was, in 1883, one of the founders of the Emancipation of Labor group, the first Marxist organization in Russia. She also translated many of Marx’s works into Russian. The correspondence with Marx referenced here, from 1881, concerns social relations in Russia and especially the nature of the peasant commune. It was this exchange that convinced Zasulich to embrace Marxism. Later, Zasulich was a member of the editorial board of Iskra with Lenin and Plekhanov. She was with the Mensheviks after the split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party and eventually became a social chauvinist during World War I, adopting a hostile attitude toward the Soviet government. as do the theoretical and strategic disputes of Russian Marxism. The “particulars of this argument” included profound differences over the character and dynamics of the revolution, the role of the bourgeoisie, the worker-peasant alliance, and so on — in addition to being a key issue in Lenin’s writings on imperialism and the differentiation between imperialist countries, dependent countries, colonies, and semi-colonies. More generally, the “particulars of this argument” mark Trotsky’s polemics with Stalinism about revolutionary dynamics in “backward” countries such as Russia and China, as well as the generalization of his theory of Permanent Revolution, against the stagist positions of class conciliation. All this seems alien to Chibber’s line of argument, but let’s return to that and see how far it takes him.

History 1, History 2, and Uneven Development

Chibber polemicizes with Chakrabarty and his concept of differentiating between a History 1 and multiple Histories 2 to account for the particular histories of non-Western pre-capitalist societies.⁴⁰Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 50. Translator’s note: Chakrabarty uses labor to illustrate what he means by these two histories. His History 1 is “a past posited by capital itself” (63) as its precondition, whereas History 2 consists of “capital’s antecedent” that “does not contribute to the self-reproduction of capital” (63–64). For the subalternist author, History 2 hinders the totalizing thrust of capitalism. His critique of Marxism is that it fails to perceive the importance of History 2, which follows its course, and does not subsume itself in History 1 (he considers it a blindness to the particular). He also questions Marxism’s expectation, due to its historicism and Eurocentrism, that History 2 will repeat the steps of History 1. He considers History 2 to be only a development “backlog,” and that it should remain in the “waiting room” until modernization.

This is refuted by Chibber, who argues that the existence of History 2 does not mean that universalization is not completed, because this universalization does not mean that all political practices are subordinated to the “logic of capital.” He adds that the main source of destabilization of capital does not pass through History 2, but through the internal contradictions of History 1 (economic contradictions and class struggle). Here he reiterates the idea that if there is a challenge to the universalizing impulse of capital, it is to be found in the class struggle, “the equally universal struggle by subaltern classes to defend their basic humanity.”[Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, 455.]

Chibber avoids nothing less than the question of imperialism and uneven and combined development.⁴¹The question of uneven and combined development does not appear in Chibber’s book. It is introduced only in the subsequent debate published as a book [Rosie Warren, ed., The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (New York: Verso, 2016], a compilation of critiques of Chibber’s book by various postcolonial theorists, along with his responses. In the introduction, Indian intellectual Achin Vanaik raises the question of uneven and combined development and vindicates Trotsky’s work, reproaching the postcolonialists for never taking it into account. That is to say, he never accounts for the great question of the Indian bourgeoisie’s subordination to imperialist capital and the consequences of this not only in terms of capital accumulation, but also with respect to the particulars of political, social, and ideological forms.

In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty refers to the topic. He argues with Eric Hobsbawm’s historicism and calls it a variety of what Western Marxism has always cultivated. He posits that Western Marxist intellectuals have addressed the incompleteness of capitalist transformation in Europe and elsewhere while maintaining the view that there is an evolutionary and necessary path from backwardness to modernity. Here he includes “the old and now discredited evolutionist paradigms of the nineteenth century,” and then points out that the same model persists in the “variations on the theme of ‘uneven development’”⁴²Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 12. first addressed by Marx and later by Lenin and Trotsky. He asserts that “whether they speak of ‘uneven development’ [or] ‘synchronicity of the non-synchronous’ or ‘structural causality,’ these strategies all retain elements of historicism in the direction of their thoughts. They all ascribe at least an underlying structural unity (if not an expressive totality) to historical process and time.”⁴³Ibid.

Space precludes delving here into the important differences between the evolutionist paradigms of the 19th century and the positions of Lenin and Trotsky that led to the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, and later to the confrontation between social-chauvinists and internationalist revolutionaries during World War I. It is important to reaffirm, however, that there is no “evolutionism” in the theory of uneven and combined development, which precisely transformed the paradigm on this issue. From Trotsky’s point of view, the fact of considering that there is a totality (capitalist social relations that have an international character) implies neither any historical teleology nor an expectation of the repetition of stages — but rather the opposite.

On this issue, Trotsky’s thinking offers a superior alternative with which to analyze the relationship between the universalizing tendencies of capital and the persistence of difference and historical particulars, in its spatial and temporal dimensions in the imperialist epoch.⁴⁴At the same time, other Marxists, such as José Carlos Mariátegui, also thought about this question and offered creative answers. See Juan Dal Maso, “Una guía para leer y releer a Mariátegui” (A Guide to Reading and Rereading Mariátegui, Contrapunto, August 30, 2020. And contrary to what Chakrabarty maintains, Trotsky pointed out — against all “evolutionist historicism” — that “a backward country assimilates the material and ideological conquests of the advanced countries. But this does not mean that it follows them slavishly, reproduces all the stages of their past.”

Of capitalism, Trotsky continued in his first chapter of The History of the Russian Revolution,

It prepares and in a certain sense realizes the universality and permanence of man’s development. By this a repetition of the forms of development by different nations is ruled out. Although compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order. The privilege of historic backwardness — and such a privilege exists — permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.

For Trotsky, this leap over the intermediate stages is not absolute; rather, “its degree is determined in the long run by the economic and cultural capacities of the country.” It is worth quoting at length from the passage because it addresses in a concentrated way many issues that intersect the postcolonialist polemic with Marxism.

From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which, for the lack of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Without this law, to be taken of course, in its whole material content, it is impossible to understand the history of Russia, and indeed of any country of the second, third or tenth cultural class.

To respond adequately to postcolonial critiques of Marxism, these polemics with the currents that held evolutionist and stagist positions in 19th- and 20th-century Marxism, from Social Democracy to Stalinism, cannot be ignored. Chibber does not give much importance to this question, so his answer is incomplete and abstract.

Finally, in his book’s conclusions, Chibber correctly notes that postcolonialists lack strategy. If one rejects the rules of logic, evidence, and rational deliberation, he points out, then one “rules out not just this or that strategy, but the very possibility of a strategy altogether.”⁴⁵Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, 533. This is a fact, and postcolonialists cannot go beyond discursive operations to destabilize or decenter colonialist narratives. The result is a practice powerless to end oppression and exploitation effectively, which go far beyond the discursive plane. But in Chibber’s case, there is a different problem. His refusal to consider the problem of workers’ hegemony in relation to the oppressed as a whole, his omission of the question of imperialism and of unequal and combined development, disarms him in the face of the strategic challenges posed in the 21st century.

Postcolonial Theory or the Theory of Permanent Revolution?

The idea of the historical failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to hegemonize the subaltern masses in a project of nationhood is at the origin of subaltern studies. These were born out of the deep disappointment of a group of leftist intellectuals with the experience of nationalism in India, as well as their frustration with the emancipatory project represented by Marxism, which they see only through the disfigured lens of Stalinism. In his introduction to The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Achin Vanaik asks why the subaltern intellectuals never took into account Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development to explain the relationship between the universal and the particular in Indian history. He points to the past Stalinist affinities of many of the founding members of the group to allow us to imagine the answer.

That allows us to go one step further. Trotsky not only championed the theory of uneven and combined development to explain the complexities of historical development in the imperialist epoch. It was also the foundation of his theory of Permanent Revolution. For India, the theory implied that the political mechanics of the revolution became, as Trotsky wrote in his 1930 The Revolution in India, “a struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie for the leadership of the peasant masses.” And to those who underestimated the revolutionary capacity of the Indian proletariat because it was numerically small in relation to the broad peasant movement, he replied that “the numerical weakness of the Russian proletariat compared to the American and English was no hindrance to the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia.”

In his writings of the 1930s, Trotsky polemicized against Stalinism’s popular-frontist positions for India, as well as against Gandhi’s nationalist strategy and his “passive resistance” that subordinated the peasantry to the liberal bourgeoisie. He also confronted the criminal campist strategy of Stalinism that renounced the anti-imperialist struggle in India in order to align itself with the “democratic” imperialisms against fascism. In India’s 20th-century history, there was no shortage of huge struggles, uprisings, and heroic peasant insurrections, or important working- class movements. But there was no strategy to fight for workers’ hegemony that could unite the peasant and subaltern masses. This balance is beyond the horizon of subaltern thinkers.

A double frustration thus becomes the basis of postcolonialist or subaltern theory, which is summed up in a school of resignation. The anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle, as well as the class struggle, is replaced by the murky but infinitely limited practices of discursive deconstruction. This is an itinerary akin to most postcolonialist thinkers. Here the focus has been on subaltern studies, and on analyzing this displacement from categories taken from the Marxist heritage and applied to more post-structuralist positions. Later elaborations of decoloniality are already fully informed by this spirit.

Since the capitalist crisis of 2008, the narrative of capitalist triumphalism has entered into crisis. The working class has spread and diversified more than ever, reaffirming its hegemonic potential to unify all oppressed layers against capital. The pandemic, the climate crisis, and inflationary trends have made the brutal contradictions of capitalist accumulation more visible. The war in Ukraine and the militaristic rearmament of the major powers raises the urgency of strategically rethinking the question of imperialism. In turn, in successive waves of class struggle, with strikes, revolts, and upheavals, the subalterns show that they can also speak. Unlike postcolonial theories — which condemn us to the mere repetition of local resistance with no way out — the socialist strategy is a tool to eradicate this society based on the brutal plundering of the people by imperialism, multiple oppressions, and exploitation.

First published in Spanish on July 30 in Contrapunto.

Translation by Scott Cooper

The post Subalterns, Postcolonialists, and the Specter of Capital: A Polemic from Marxism appeared first on Left Voice.

We are not a good and virtuous nation. God does not bless us above other nations. Victory is not assured. War is not noble and uplifting. The clash between the reality of combat and the Disneyfied version of combat consumed by the public, one that propels many young men and women into war, creates not only dissonance and moral injury, but an existential crisis—one that combat veterans, at least those who are self-reflective, must cope with for the rest of their lives.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who fought in Vietnam, and Danny Sjursen, a retired Army major who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have just published Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars. Bacevich and Sjursen, West Point graduates like many writers in the book, come out of the military culture. They began as true believers, embracing the myths of American goodness and virtue, and the military honor code pounded into them as young cadets at the military academy. The reality of combat, as it has for generations, exposed the lies told by the generals and politicians.

Andrew Bacevich is a West Point graduate, retired Army Colonel, and Vietnam war veteran. He is also an emeritus professor of history and international relations at Boston University and the co-founder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His books include The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism and After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. He is the editor of the book Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

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Pre-Production: Kayla Rivara
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Post-Production: Adam Coley

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Transcript

Chris Hedges:  Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who fought in Vietnam, and Danny Sjursen, a retired Army major who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have just published Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars. Bacevich and Sjursen, West Point graduates, like many writers in the book, come out of the military culture. They began as true believers, embracing the myths of American goodness and virtue, and the military honor code pounded into them as young cadets at the military academy. The reality of combat, as it has for generations, exposed the lies told by the generals and politicians.

We are not a good and virtuous nation. God does not bless us above other nations. Victory is not assured. War is not noble and uplifting. The clash between the reality of combat and the Disneyfied version of combat consumed by the public, one that propels many young men and women into war, creates not only dissonance and moral injury, but an existential crisis. An existential crisis combat veterans, at least those who are self-reflective, must cope with for the rest of their lives.

Joining me to discuss the themes in the book Paths Of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, is Andrew Bacevich. So, at the introduction of this book – These are a series of essays, many of them incredibly powerful – You write that the book “offers insights into how and why recent US military efforts have gone so badly astray. Flagrant malpractices by those at the top inflicted untold damage on the troops we ostensibly esteem, on populations US policy makers vowed to liberate, and ultimately on our own democracy. The adverse effects of war are by no means confined to the immediate arena in which fighting occurs.” But I want to ask you, isn’t this true, from Philoctetes to Yossarian, isn’t this the old story of war?

Andrew Bacevich:  I suppose so. That said, we undertook our post 9/11 wars – Wars of choice, we should emphasize – At a moment when our political leaders insisted, and most Americans, I think, believed that we had acquired, built the best military force in all of history. And therefore, we believed, we told ourselves, that military force employed by the United States had a utility, effectiveness, with the events of 9/11 providing the basis of then putting force to work. That’s what we sought to do after 9/11. And the contributors to this book that Danny and I put together were among those who raised their hands and said, yeah, I volunteer, I’ll serve, and therefore experienced the consequences.

Chris Hedges:  Before we get into… All of the writers in this book are from the current wars, you yourself served in Vietnam. Before we get into what they have written, this again is you writing. You say, “I concluded that classifying Vietnam as either a mistake or a tragedy amounts to little more than subterfuge. To use those terms is to evade a much deeper and more troubling truth. In fact, from its very earliest stages until its mortifying conclusion, America’s war in Vietnam was a crime.” Why a crime?

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, let me acknowledge, first of all, that my own perspective on Vietnam… It’s been a half century since I served there, [it] has evolved over time. At one point, I was certainly a true believer. I don’t think that lasted terribly long. But I think I have come to believe that the dishonesty that provided the context for American intervention, and the further dishonesty that actually grew, deepened over the course of the conduct of the war, was so fundamentally wrong. And the absence of voices from within, from inside, whether they were policy makers or generals, was so disturbing that, in retrospect, I think criminal is the right term to describe the entire enterprise.

Chris Hedges:  Would you use the word criminal to describe the enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya?

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, first of all, it’s important for us to distinguish between those two wars. We tend to lump them together. I think that a case can be made that there was justification for intervention in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the justification being that it was important for the United States to demonstrate that anyone collaborating with terrorists who would conduct an attack on us was going to pay a heavy price. So yes, there was, I think, a reasoned political argument for punishing the Taliban. Doesn’t follow that there was a reasoned argument for staying there for 20 years and trying to rebuild the place. So it became a criminal undertaking.

The Iraq case is different. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. I firmly believe that the Iraq War stemmed from the intentions of the George W. Bush administration to embark upon a preposterous effort to remake the entire greater Middle East. So it was deeply flawed from the outset. I think it was illegal, and yes, it was a criminal undertaking.

Chris Hedges:  So the first essay is by Erik Edstrom, who also went to West Point, wrote a very good book that I read. And just a couple points he makes in his essay, I want to ask you about. He writes, “Military indoctrination is the voluntary surrender of one’s own identity to join a profession that often takes away the human dignity of others by force. Through repetition, service members have their values, behaviors, and identity recalibrated with the ultimate aim of making them willing to kill or be killed in political violence without thinking about it too much. It is the construction of blind faith in the state and the deconstruction of any critical thinking that could stand in opposition to the state’s aims.” He went to West Point, you went to West Point. Is that a correct assessment of what you are taught, or can we use the term indoctrination, what you are fed at West Point?

Andrew Bacevich:  Yeah. He states it more sharply than I think I would. You just used the term indoctrination. I think I prefer to use the term socialization. I’m referring here to people who go to the service academies, not people who enlist in the Marine Corps and go to boot camp or enlist in the Navy and learn the skills of a sailor. But my experience at West Point exposed me to a very sophisticated and tested program of bringing… Of imparting a very particular worldview to me and to my classmates, to all of us, collectively and individually. And the worldview centered on the sacredness of the United States’ Constitutional order, centered on the belief that the United States Army was the most important institution in the United States, that the wellbeing of the republic, the survival of the republic, rested on whether or not that army was properly supported, and whether it did its job.

So I left, I think we all left, deeply imbued with that way of thinking. When you undergo that process beginning at age 17, it sticks. I think it took a long time for me… Probably it really took until after I got out of the army 20-some years later to begin to distance myself from those notions, to think critically about those notions, to achieve some amount of intellectual independence. I think my learning process testifies to how comprehensive and persuasive that process of socialization can be.

Chris Hedges:  Erik writes about visiting a close friend who had been seriously injured by an IED in Afghanistan. He arrives in the intensive care burn unit in San Antonio. He’s “six-foot-four. [He is] mummified,” he writes, “in gauze, only the portion of his body needed for intravenous tubes were exposed. Parts of his face were raw and marbled as if a psychopath had flayed him with a cheese slicer and then worked him over with a blowtorch. His ears and nose were charred black; A stiff breeze would’ve made them crumble to dust. Lips were split… He was covered in greasy ointment. That’s a very important moment for him. I wondered if it had a parallel. When I covered the war in El Salvador, the first photographer who I knew who was killed suddenly changed the whole nature of war for me. I think that’s what Erik, in many ways, is saying. But I wonder if you could speak to that experience?

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, mine was different. It was, I think, the beginning of my junior year at West Point, and my best friend from high school, he would become my brother-in-law. He’s my wife’s brother. Dropped out of college, enlisted in the Marine Corps, deployed to Vietnam. And within a month of arriving in country, stepped on a mine and blew his leg off. And there began a journey of decline that was destined to go on for quite some time. He was sent to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, and I asked for emergency leave so I could go visit him. They allowed me to go, and I did. So I was able to at least reassure myself that he was still alive. But that was a moment of awakening. Although, I was still undergoing that process of socialization. So I don’t know if that moment, as powerful as it was, really had the impact that it would have were I, at that time, living in a somewhat different environment. But yeah, I remember that.

Chris Hedges:  Erik also writes about how… He said, “In the decade following graduation, the number of my friends injured or killed crossed into the double digits and kept going. Some were shot to death. Others were blown up. One died in a helicopter crash. A couple committed suicide. Many more were maimed and horrifically disfigured. Nearly all of us harbored internal demons.” I want to ask you about those demons.

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, I’m not going to confess to my own [laughs]. My West Point class, I believe we lost a dozen classmates. The numbers may be slightly wrong, but about a dozen killed, a far larger number wounded, some terribly wounded, some subsequently suffering from PTSD quite severely. To include a classmate that I did not know when we were cadets, but who came to be a very close friend after I moved to where we live right now in Massachusetts. And my friendship with him taught me, showed me, gave me an appreciation of PTSD. He had had a terrible tour as a platoon leader in West Point, and carried with that, suffered from that for many years thereafter, until, through his own courage, was able to get his life on track.

The past was never forgotten. The past never really went away. But through his own courage and determination, he was able to put his life back together. I think that because of our friendship, I gleaned a deeper understanding of how these injuries, moral injuries, in some respects are… I don’t want to say worse than the physical injuries, but they are comparable in terms of their devastating impact on people.

One of the things I think I’ve come to appreciate about our more recent wars is the extent to which… Because we do have a better appreciation now of PTSD, an appreciation of soldier self-abuse, former soldier self-abuse, suicides, drugs. We know about that. I think that the country is still insufficiently aware of the afflictions that our veterans bear. Not all. Not all. But that many veterans bear as a consequence of what they experienced in uniform. And of course, to my mind, what makes it all the more tragic, or perhaps I should say reprehensible, is that the wars themselves are stupid, not worth fighting.

Chris Hedges:  I want to talk about moral injury. Matthew Hoh writes about it, I think quite eloquently, in the book. But it’s different from PTSD. Define moral injury.

Andrew Bacevich:  I don’t know that I can. Matthew Hoh’s essay is spectacularly good. And so I don’t know exactly how he would define it. But I think it is to come away from the experience of war with the moral sensibility that you carried with you from your childhood and into uniform shattered, and therefore left without a moral compass to guide you. That would be my definition. But again, I’d have to go look at Matthew’s essay in the book to remind myself of how he defined it.

Chris Hedges:  One of the writers, Joy Damiani, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. So, she ends up in the Public Affairs Unit as an Army journalist, which is great, because I think it just exposes the totalitarian system that the Army is. She said you were never allowed to “…Use the word ‘failure’ in print, never hinted at the possibility that every victory was actually a loss, and never, ever technically lied. [It was] a propaganda of omission. We, the government’s very own uniformed ‘journalists’, didn’t overtly fabricate. We just diligently told only the news deemed appropriate for team spirit.” The lie of omission is still a lie. But talk about the language that the military uses to describe itself, and the kind of inbred censorship inside the military, what it projects outward, and what’s happening internally.

Andrew Bacevich:  Yeah. I’m not sure that I would single out the military for being uniquely at fault. It seems to me that institutional journalism, that is to say, journalism produced by institutions for internal consumption, is necessarily an exercise in fraudulence, whether we’re talking about working for Coca-Cola or your local hospital. So, military journalism, I think, very much conforms to that pattern. And therefore, the consumer should be wary of what he or she is reading. It’s not to be trusted. Quite frankly, we should be wary of what we read in
The New York Times and The Washington Post as well. But, perhaps more so when the news is being created by an institution to serve the needs of the institution.

Chris Hedges:  Although they do fabricate. There’s an essay by Pat Tillman’s brother, and they fabricate it completely. He was killed by friendly fire and they had… And then Jessica Lynch, who becomes a kind of female version of Rambo, is completely untrue. So they will fabricate. There was a passage by Vincent Emmanuel that I found very interesting because it sounded more like Vietnam than Iraq. I’m just going to read it and then have you comment.

“Morale continued to drop during the second deployment in Western Iraq. We started smoking weed on patrol and doing coke while setting up observation posts. We’d brought most of the drugs with us when coming over. I remember emptying the first aid kit latched to my flak jacket and filling up the pouch with as much weed as I could. Most of those drugs lasted only the first few months of deployment, though. We’d planned to stretch out our supply to the end, but it didn’t stay secret for very long that we had good shit with us. And how could we deny anyone the pleasure of getting stoned under the brilliant, unprecedented, Mesopotamian sky?

The deployment turned sour quickly, with several Marines, including some of our commanding officers, killed in the first 72 hours. After that, things went from bad to worse. We shot at non-combatants. We tortured prisoners. We blew up civilian structures. We ran over, mutilated, and took pictures of dead Iraqis. As one headline in Maxim magazine put it, Al-Qa’im was the ‘Wild West of Iraq’. Frankly, we did whatever the fuck we wanted. 18-year-olds with machine guns, rocket launchers, and a license to kill…” Talk about that.

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, first of all, I think that with regard to drug use, I didn’t serve in Iraq. I can’t testify to what happened in units there. I did serve in Vietnam, and although I didn’t use the drugs, there’s no question that, particularly in the latter part of the war, drug use was everywhere. A lot of heroin, in particular, in one particular unit in which I served.

Now, with regard to the terrible accusations that he wields with regard to his unit and its misconduct, again, I’m not in a position to judge. I dare say he is telling the truth as he understands the truth. The only thing I would say is that it is important to recognize that units differ, that the climate within unit A may well be different from the climate in unit B. And therefore, even if we take it face value – I do take it face value – The charges that he is making, I would be very careful about assuming that similar conditions existed in every other unit in the theater.

There’s an essay that you haven’t cited by Buddhika Jayamaha, who I know pretty well. After his time in the Army, he became a professor at the Air Force Academy, with a PhD in political science from Northwestern. An astonishing up from the bootstraps achievement. Jay Man, as he is known, served in the 82nd Airborne Division as an enlisted soldier, as an enlisted soldier in a unit that was assigned to conduct nighttime raids targeting so-called high value targets. I take his testimony as truthful.

And what he says is that his unit was well disciplined, had high morale, enlisted soldiers respected their leaders. His dissent, however – And this is why his essay is important to the book – Is that the entire effort was fundamentally misguided, because the effect of the effort was for the Americans to take the war away from the Iraqis, to make it, basically, an imperial enterprise. We will win the war for you. And what Jay Man and his colleagues came to understand was, hey, if this thing’s going to be won, they’ve got to win it on their own.

My point in giving that little anecdote is that we need to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush. I would argue that one of the strengths of this collection is that the perspectives on offer vary widely. We’ve got anti-war perspectives, people who basically argue that all war is wrong. We’ve got anti-Iraq or Afghanistan wars perspectives, people arguing that those wars were ill-advised or ill-conducted. So these dissenters, these military dissenters, as we refer to them, came to their perspective the hard way through their own personal experience with war, with military service, and in this volume share with the reader what they experienced, what they learned, what it all means to them.

Chris Hedges:  Well, I think that’s true in every war I’ve covered. For me, one of the most important elements of a unit, if I was with a combat unit, if they didn’t go back and retrieve their dead and their wounded, I immediately got out as fast as I could, because it showed a disintegration within that unit, which is something that Victor obviously experienced. So you’re right. It does, in every war I’ve covered. But that that was a reality within Iraq I found interesting. He writes at the end that he’s about to be redeployed. “I promised myself that if I were forced to deploy for the third time, I would kill as many of my commanding officers as humanly possible.” Fragging was a very real experience in the Vietnam War. I think some people estimate as high as 25% of US officers were killed by their own soldiers, if I have that number right.

Matthew Hoh, beautiful essay. “I cannot emphasize enough the destructive effects – Moral, emotional, and spiritual – Of moral injury,” we were speaking about before. “It is believed by many to be the primary driver of combat veteran suicides. It is much more than mere guilt, shame, and regret, which it incorporates but supersedes in its manifestations and symptoms. The deaths of both Iraqis and Americans, the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people, the anguish of American families bereft of their hoped-for futures were a burden on my soul. And I had not only witnessed the slaughter, but taken part in it too. My hands had been covered in blood and brains, fragments of ligament and bone. I was a perpetrator.” And he was. I love Matthew. I know him, and I admire him tremendously. And that’s the difference between myself and… I had bodyguards, but I never shot anyone. And I think that’s a big difference.

Andrew Bacevich:  Yeah, no doubt about it.

Chris Hedges:  It’s a bipartisan effort. This is, again, Hoh. He said, “It soon became apparent the only difference between the Iraq war and the Afghan War is that one had been run by a Republican and the other by a Democrat.” You have written to this, but on an issue like war, just like trade deals or anything else, there’s really no daylight between the two ruling parties.

Andrew Bacevich:  Unquestionably true, until we get to Donald Trump.

Chris Hedges:  Yes. He’s created his own party. I don’t know what we call it. It’s a cult, but certainly among the… You’re right.

Andrew Bacevich:  Yes.

Chris Hedges:  Among the establishment [crosstalk]

Andrew Bacevich:  No, no. There’s no question. With regard to national security, there is a consensus, I think, basically dating from December 7, 1941, that has only rarely been challenged, and has never been toppled. Again, my war was the Vietnam War. I think as that war went badly, as opposition and protest grew, there was a challenge to the foreign policy consensus. There was an insistence that there should be no more Vietnams. And that notion, I think, survived for a brief time after the fall of Saigon. And yet, by the time we get to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, it vanishes.

Chris Hedges:  But isn’t, Andrew, that the difference between Vietnam and the 20 years of warfare in the Middle East? Is that we did ask questions about ourselves as a nation, as a people, that we had not, perhaps, confronted before in the wake of Vietnam, that there was a kind of reckoning. If people like Westmoreland were not necessarily held accountable, they were certainly exposed. And that seems to be completely absent now.

Andrew Bacevich:  I don’t fully agree with you, Chris. In my view, we squandered the moment for real accountability about Vietnam. Remember, in 1980 we elect Ronald Reagan president.

Chris Hedges:  Well, I’m thinking of the immediate aftermath, what we saw… The fall of Saigon was ’73?

Andrew Bacevich:  From 1975 to 1980, let’s say.

Chris Hedges:  Yeah, no. It was a brief time period, but it was there.

Andrew Bacevich:  Fair enough.

Chris Hedges:  In a way that it’s not there now.

Andrew Bacevich:  Absolutely agree. What we have now is, let’s forget about Iraq and Afghanistan. Hey, let’s talk about Ukraine.

Chris Hedges:  Right.

Andrew Bacevich:  Which is the new “good war”. I don’t think it is a good war. I think it was an unnecessary war. But it’s amazing to me how quickly the scandalous departure from Kabul that occurred early in the Biden administration, which touched off a furor of anger within the United States. It’s amazing to me how quickly that anger has diminished and the establishment has moved on. Quite frankly, the media has moved on.

Chris Hedges:  Great. I want to thank the Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com

Speaker:  And The Chris Hedges Report. Get some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material with Chris and Andrew Bacevich.

Chris Hedges:  So I’m just going to ask a couple questions for the bonus material here. I want to ask about the kind of… You talked about the socialization process within the academy. I think it’s maybe from Erik’s essay. They’re all shown a film, some kind of film with uplifting music about people being blown up. I want to talk about, if maybe we can use this term, the pornography of violence, but the acculturation or socialization to violence within popular culture.

Andrew Bacevich:  Chris, I don’t know if I have much to say on that.

Chris Hedges:  Well, did you watch the movie American Sniper?

Andrew Bacevich:  No.

Chris Hedges:  Oh, well you didn’t miss anything.

Andrew Bacevich:  Okay. What was the one about the EOD team?

Chris Hedges:  Oh, that was Hurt Locker.

Andrew Bacevich:  I saw Hurt Locker.

Chris Hedges:  That movie opened with a quote from one of my books.

Andrew Bacevich:  Ah, that’s high praise.

Chris Hedges:  What did you think of that?

Andrew Bacevich:  Didn’t it win the movie [crosstalk] Oscar?

Chris Hedges:  I think it may have.

Andrew Bacevich:  I thought it was overblown. I thought it was morally empty. We get to the end, if I remember correctly, and the protagonist appears to be profoundly affected by his experiences in Iraq, but the effects are not at all clear. And if I’m remembering, maybe I’m not, he decides he needs to go back again, his motivation not in the least clear. So, what did the movie mean? What was I supposed to learn from it? Maybe I’m not particularly perceptive, but I couldn’t tell.

Chris Hedges:  I certainly [inaudible] as a war correspondent. We leapt from war to war to war. We became so deformed we couldn’t function in a society not at war. And you get those adrenaline rushes are real. When you finished your tour in Vietnam, did you want to go back, or had you said, I never want to do that again?

Andrew Bacevich:  No, no. I was recently married. My wife wouldn’t have let me. I think when I came back from Vietnam, my principal reaction was one of confusion. I had a hard time unpacking the entire experience. Not so much what had happened to me personally as an individual, but how our country had gotten itself in that particular situation, and how the army in which I was serving had come to the verge of collapse in the course of failing to do what it was supposed to do in Vietnam. And so for reasons that I really can’t remember, I decided that I was going to begin the process of coming to some understanding of my war by reading about the French Indochina War, the effort by the French after World War II to reclaim their empire in Indochina. A futile exercise that, of course, ended in complete failure. Somehow I imagined that exploring the causes of that failure would help me understand our failure. And that really began my effort to study the war, which I’ve continued to do ever since.

Chris Hedges:  Well, that was Bernard Fall.

Andrew Bacevich:  Bernard Fall, he wrote one particular volume on the… Well, he wrote several volumes, but one in particular I remember was on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. You’re referring to his famous one, which was Street Without Joy, which was also very, very, very important history.

Chris Hedges:  I have to ask you about Petraeus, and it does come up in your book After the Apocalypse. But they’re writing these counterinsurgency doctrines. Petraeus, of course, was one of the chief figures in the writing of the current updated counterinsurgency doctrine, which you’re very critical of, and especially coming out of Vietnam. Why? What is it that they just can’t understand?

Andrew Bacevich:  I think one of things that is important for outsiders, meaning people not in the military, to understand, is that this very simplistic notion that the general at the top gives orders and everybody down the line says, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir, and implements exactly what he wanted to have done, that’s not the way it works. First of all, as the general’s orders are disseminated, inevitably there is very substantial misunderstanding of what he or she says. Furthermore, subordinate commanders exercise far more freedom of action than one may imagine. Selective obedience. Well, we’ll do this part, but not that part. So the notion that Petraeus taking command in Iraq, what was it, early 2007, serves as an architect issuing orders consistent with the counterinsurgency manual and radically turns the war around, is simply nonsense.

That story was invented as a way of enabling the George W. Bush administration to continue the war, which by 2007 had become both unwinnable and purposeless. Again, it’s my strong judgment that the purpose of that war begun in 2003 was to embark upon a radical transformation of the greater Middle East, beginning in Iraq, but ultimately extending to any other countries in the region. It failed. To this day, neither the architects of that policy nor the senior military officers who implemented it are willing to acknowledge the extent of that failure. And I think the Petraeus myth, the myth that Petraeus is a great captain, is one important obstacle that prevents us from understanding just how badly awry that war went.

Chris Hedges:  Well, every time you have a catastrophic failure, this is MacArthur with the Philippines, they’ll suddenly turn these figures into mythic heroes. In a way, it’s diametrically opposed to what’s happened, but it’s a very effective technique to perpetuate the war and elevate the command, isn’t it?

Andrew Bacevich:  And prevents accountability.

Chris Hedges:  Right.

Andrew Bacevich:  We have had no accountability regarding Iraq and Afghanistan. And I dare say we won’t. Although I think that the contributors to this volume, men and women who served, do provide readers a clearer understanding of the reality of our post 9/11 wars.

Chris Hedges:  I have one last question. What are the consequences of this, both political and military leadership not being held accountable?

Andrew Bacevich:  Well, I think it increases the likelihood of repetition. You can fail and you can get away with it. And I think in any line of work, whether we’re talking about Major League Baseball, if you can lose all your games and never make the playoffs and still get hired again next year, then you don’t have a heck of a lot of incentive to improve your performance. So accountability, I think, is essential in any walk of life. It’s especially essential in warfare. And in the case of the United States, no accountability exists.

Chris Hedges:  Great. Thank you. That was Andrew Bacevich.

In interview with British journalist, Morales says the U.S. uses NATO to provoke wars and sell weapons. U.S./UK-backed coup against […]

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Washington, D.C. – On July 18, Routledge published a critical new book by militarism and national security expert Miriam Pemberton, Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow, entitled Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies.

On August 4, at 12:30-2:00 PM ET, Pemberton will speak about her new book at a special virtual launch event, “Whatever Happened to the Peace Dividend, and Can We Get One Back?” hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, together with the Friends Committee on National Legislation, CODEPINK, Pentagon Budget Campaign, Project on Government Oversight, and Public Citizen. To RSVP as press or ask questions ahead of the book launch event, please contact IPS Media Manager Olivia Alperstein at olivia@ips-dc.org.

The U.S. military economy incorporates hundreds of American communities. This is the first book to connect our national security apparatus to a study of communities at the local level via deeply reported profiles of six military locations, the militarized U.S. border, and hyper weapons in the pipeline.

“Miriam Pemberton has written the definitive contemporary account of the cultural and economic behemoth that is ‘National Security.’ She uses her deep expertise and vivid writing to examine this terrain and suggest another way is not just possible but existentially and immediately necessary,” noted Catherine Lutz, Professor Emerita of              Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University and Co-Director of the Costs of War project.

The six locations in the book include production sites, bases, and nuclear weapons labs, and they feature both military Meccas and out-of-the way installations.

At a time when the broader debate over military spending has heated up thanks to debates over the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act and the Pentagon budget, Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies offers a timely, sharp, and insightful analysis of the military’s structure, self-perpetuating policies, budget, and full cost.

Pemberton traces the lines of connection between her tour stops and U.S. foreign policy, industrial policy, and budget priorities. She examines the meaning of national security in the current moment, as climate change becomes what the military itself calls “an urgent and growing threat.” And she demonstrates how redirecting funding for our militarized foreign and industrial policy toward climate security can help these communities become part of the solution.

“In the long run, there is simply no path to a demilitarized world that doesn’t deal with the economic foundations of war,” noted Pemberton. “I hope Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies will be a resource for that effort. In the short run, we have to keep pushing. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.”

Miriam Pemberton is available for interviews. To receive a copy of the book and request an interview, contact IPS Media Manager Olivia Alperstein at (202) 704-9011 or olivia@ips-dc.org

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About the Institute for Policy Studies

For nearly six decades, the Institute for Policy Studies has provided critical research support for major social movements and progressive leaders inside and outside government and on the ground around the United States and the world. As the United States’ oldest progressive multi-issue think tank, IPS turns bold ideas into action through public scholarship and mentorship of the next generation of progressive scholars and activists.

 

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