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Notes from a cliff-edge

Ukraine - land for peace?

5/24/2022

 
538 words: 4-minute read

The war in Ukraine has been going on for just over three months and there’s no end in sight. Frustrated by Ukrainian resistance, Russia is focusing its efforts on the east and south of the country and it seems to be employing tactics used in Syria, laying waste to whatever gets in the way. The enormous civilian suffering is plain to see, and the collateral damage is spreading further and wider in the form of hikes in energy prices and world food shortages (especially for the poor). Somalia and Benin source 100% of imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Egypt 82%, Sudan and Lebanon 75%, and Libya 50%. As Tom Stevenson writes in the London Review of Books, 'The longer the war continues, the greater the certainty of hunger'.

In addition the geopolitical stakes have risen enormously with Sweden and Finland applying to join NATO after decades of neutrality. So the downsides of the conflict are obvious: clear and increasing local, regional and global instability. You’d have thought that everyone would be trying their hardest to end the war.
 
Against this backdrop the decision by western countries to supply Ukraine with ever-increasing amounts of weaponry at ever-increasing levels of sophistication is hard to understand, because this does nothing but prolong the war and the suffering and instability that goes with it. The defence is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation, and nations should be free to determine their own fate rather than have it determined by force of arms. Of course, but with sovereignty comes responsibility, and we should be asking what the responsible course of action is at this juncture. How should sovereign Ukraine act, now?   
 
The answer is: land for peace.  Long touted as a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the principle needs to be dusted off and applied to the Ukraine war. It is absolutely clear that the war will not end by one or the other of the combatants achieving total victory, so compromise is in any case inevitable.  Far more will be lost than gained by putting off what is going to happen anyway - more dead and wounded, more senseless destruction, more starvation, more energy poverty.  All of this could be avoided by a responsible exercise of Ukraine’s sovereignty.
 
I hold not the smallest candle for Vladimir Putin, but well before the Ukraine conflict the West really should have paid closer attention to Russia’s concerns regarding its southern flank. It should have been made quite clear that the exercise of Ukrainian sovereignty did not include it joining NATO. Had it done so, the conflict would likely have been avoided.  However, we are where we are: Putin’s plan has blown up in his face, thousands on both sides have been killed and wounded and we are all experiencing the collateral damage caused by the conflict - the poor and vulnerable, as ever, more than anyone. And the west must take its fair share of the blame - especially leftwing cosmopolitans who have somehow misplaced their objections to overweaning conceptions of national sovereignty, and are backing to the hilt Ukraine’s conception of what it means.
 
So let’s focus on stopping the war rather than punishing Russia - down to the last Ukrainian. Every extra weapon given to Ukraine delays the peace talks that will inevitably take place. Every day of delay is a day of more suffering and destruction. And the only people truly rubbing their hands with glee are Western arms manufacturers.

Que vaut la vie sans libertÉ?

2/14/2022

 
Picture
‘Que vaut la vie sans liberté?’ reads the placard. It wouldn’t be out of place in the hands of a revolutionary leftist in 1968 Paris, but it’s Nice 2022, and it’s the right not the left that’s flying the freedom banner.

During the pandemic the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the language of freedom to the right. Rather than offer aternatives to policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.

As a result the word ‘libertarian’ has been completely appropriated by small-state liberals.  At one time the left would have fought to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.

What’s life without liberty? is a question the left has forgotten to ask.  It needs to do so, quick, before the freedom train runs away for good.

What is to be done?

2/4/2022

 
935 words - 5 minute read

Politically, economically, socially and ecologically, the status quo is a disaster.
 
In times gone by the left would be demanding radical change and the overthrow of a corrupt and moribund system that thrives on inequality, doubles down on surveillance and corrals and infantalises entire populations in the name of a spurious ‘security’ that kills us in our tens of thousands and calls it a success.
 
But the left - the experimental, bold, emancipatory left - is hardly to be seen.
 
Unaccountably and indefensibly, it’s the right that flies the banner of rebellion. Of course their rebellion is disorganised, reactionary, short-sighted, founded on rumour or worse, and ends up strengthening the very forces it claims to oppose. But the lesson the left could draw is that they’re confrontational, disruptive, and visibly angry.
 
When the left does get onto the streets - Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, the Sarah Everard vigil - it brings down the predictable wrath of the repressive state apparatus but fails to draw the appropriate conclusion: that progress through passive resistance is, right now, an illusion. As someone said recently, it’s all blah blah blah.
 
So the left has made the huge mistake of ceding the practice of revolt to the right. Stunned by the advances of the right in the culture wars, and allowing it complete control of the language that used to drive  emancipatory politics - the language of freedom - the left’s feeble response has been to defend the status quo for all its worth.
 
In this sense the pandemic has been a disaster for the emancipatory left. Rather than oppose policies that systematically favoured the stay-at-home middle class, granted powers to the police that would have been the envy of the dictatorships the left used to oppose, and prevented us from accompanying family members as they drew their last breath, the left went along with it all.  Sometimes, indeed, it asked for more of all these things.
 
This vacated a huge tract of political territory called ‘freedom’, and the right marched in. So it’s the right that’s in the streets, the right that attracts disadvantaged and disillusioned young people desperate for change, the right that is scandalous, subversive and countercultural.
 
Tragically, the word ‘libertarian’ has now been completely appropriated by small-state liberals, and even leftist commentators automatically elide libertarianism with right-wing politics.  At one time the left would have fought tooth-and-nail to recover the word for its own emancipatory project, the bedrock principle of which is that freedom is impossible without the security that can only be provided by the community acting in other-regarding concert. Nothing could be further from the fantasies of the libertarian right, which make a bonfire of the ties that bind people together in mutual aid.
 
Maybe the left has given ground on freedom so it can double down it on its own unique calling card: equality? But no. Once again the pandemic has caught the left with its pants down. In the past two years the ten richest men in the world have doubled their fortunes while 160 million extra people have been plunged into poverty - defined as living on less the $5.5 a day. The left’s reaction? To flood change.org and 38degrees with toothless demands while, in a two-fingered simulacrum, the 100 richest people in the world ask to pay more taxes.
 
The right is everywhere the left should be. But instead of fighting for these spaces and recapturing the language of disruption and rebellion for itself, the left is static, sclerotic, like rabbits in the headlights of an onrushing car, frozen into immobility by its incapacity to think creatively about either the present or the future. Antonio Gramsci distinguished between a war of manoeuvre (physically overwhelming the state’s coercive apparatus) and a war of position (fighting it on the terrain of culture). Give the overwhelming physical power of the state he recommended a war of position. The left has taken him at his word and the result has been downward spiral of navel-gazing while the capitalist state leads us towards a disaster of species-destroying proportions.
 
If the emancipatory left stood for anything it was for universal liberation. But in its determination to champion special interests the left has completely lost sight of the universalist demands against which to hold the status quo to account. An example: better treatment for women in prison? Of course! But a univeralising emancipatory left would have one question and one recommendation.
 
The question: what does ‘better’ mean? It can't be ‘treat them like male prisoners’ because conditions in UK prisons are appalling.  If it’s ‘treat them differently because they are women’ this is also music to the ears of defenders of the status quo, because it leaves 95%
(the percentage occupied by men) of what is quaintly and absurdly called the prison ‘estate’  completely  intact. Some universal standard for 'better' is needed, and it can't be deduced from the condition or experience of any one group, collective or protected category.
 
The left-libertarian recommendation: reduce the prison population by at least half (prison numbers in England and Wales have increased by 84% since 1990, from 44,975 to just under 83,000). And then turn the rest into schools (50% of the prison population is functionally illiterate).
 
Tactically inept and strategically naive, that’s where the left is right now, with every single move captured, appropriated and defanged by the very forces it’s trying to oppose.
 
So where now?
 
Maybe here.
 
And here.

political cross-dressing

9/21/2021

 
530 words: 4-minute read

Leftist progressive environmentalist George Monbiot is shocked that there are antivaxxers among his acquaintances.  Something ‘weird’ is going on, he says, whereby the curiosity, scepticism and suspicion typical of people on the left has driven those selfsame people to adopt rightwing versions of this language, so much so that ‘some have succumbed to a far-right conspiracy ideation, up to and including Q-anon’.
 
He’s right, that’s weird.
 
He goes on, ‘The far-right seized and repurposed the language of leftwing revolt: rebel against the elite, take back control etc … Some people on the left, hearing stuff that sounded familiar, seem to have fallen for it’.
 
Right again.
 
There’s more: ‘The necessary and justifiable revolt against corporate and oligarchic power has morphed in some cases into an extreme individualism’.
 
Monbiot is right about that too.
 
‘It doesn't help that we've suffered decades of betrayal by formerly left-ish political parties, that fell into line with neoliberal capitalism’, he writes, ‘This left many people both profoundly confused and susceptible to the liberationist claims of the far right’.
 
Absolutely.
 
He concludes: ‘Left and right political parties have swapped their language. Now the right talks about liberation and revolt. And the left talks about security and stability’.
 
Acute. Brilliant. A perfect summary of the confused and confusing state of ideological play in liberal-capitalist countries like the UK today.
 
What’s missing, though, is the recognition that the left has contributed to this state of affairs by allowing the right to arrogate to itself the language of freedom and liberation in the two key events of the past few years: Brexit and Covid.
 
By the time Covid turned up the Brexit battle was over, but the left hadn’t learned its lesson. Instead of debating, designing and exemplifying a left-libertarian approach to Covid it went full throttle for an ironclad lockdown, leaving the door marked ‘freedom and liberation’ wide open for the swivel-eyed right of assorted denialists and anti-vaxxers to walk right through.
 
And some on the left, as Monbiot recognises and bemoans, have followed them.
 
But the answer is not to accuse these leftists of ‘falling for’ false idols, of ‘succumbing’ to conspiracy, or of some fatal ‘confusion’ that can only be put right by attending to the high priests of correct leftist thinking.
 
The answer is to focus unerringly on that sweet spot where freedom AND security are located.
 
In the Covid case, this would have been to point out that a properly funded NHS and social care system, staffed by properly rewarded professionals (all this representing SECURITY), would have allowed family members to be present as their relatives passed away instead of dying lonely and isolated (representing FREEDOM). The left were all too ready to allow elderly people in care homes to be kept in segregated solitude for months on end - ‘collateral damage’ to be stoically accepted for the sake of an unwavering commitment to an uncompromising lockdown.
 
So yes, it’s weird that some of George Monbiot’s freedom-loving acquaintances have turned to the right. But this was never going to help.

where is the libertarian left?

4/5/2021

 
479 words; 4-minute read

It’s become a commonplace that Covid has amplified features and fissures in society that we always knew existed but never quite acknowledged.
 
For instance there’s the importance of people who keep things going without us realising: shop workers, parcel deliverers, lorry drivers. If reward is a function of indispensability, we now know that these people are poorly rewarded.  (Though the UK government’s 1% pay rise for nurses shows that recognition by no means leads directly to justice).
 
Then there’s the dispute over the role of experts, and attempts by populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to sideline them in favour of quack remedies or downright Covid denialism.
 
We always knew that wages are awarded in inverse proportion to a person’s usefulness to society and that populism is dangerous, but it took the glare of Covid to make these things unavoidably obvious.
 
But there’s another fissure that was barely visible pre-Covid yet which has come to define much of the reaction to the pandemic: the gulf between libertarians and authoritarians. Unfortunately, and with potentially disastrous post-Covid consequences, the libertarian position has been entirely dominated by the right, leaving the left defenceless as the capitalist state arrogates more and more power to itself under cover of Covid darkness.
 
Over the past twelve months it’s been something of a surprise to see how readily people on the political left have lined up behind disciplinary policies and practices that in normal times they’d have fought tooth and nail. Whether it’s increased police powers, enhanced surveillance, Covid passports or the criminalising of information, leftists have either waved through repressive measures or raised the stakes by suggesting how helpful even more repression would be. Voices on the left calling out these measures have been few and far between.
 
Most disturbing of all is the shock horror these same people display when a bill comes before parliament increasing police powers and curbing the right to protest.  What, one wonders, did they expect?  Politically literate leftists shouldn’t have to read Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben on states of exception to know that regimes will always take advantage of emergency to intensify their authority.
 
It’s taken Covid to bring both the outright and the naive disciplinarian left out of the woodwork, and as the Covid crisis draws to a close it may be too late to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle.  It wouldn't be too bad if ceding a libertarian approach to Covid to the right had just left it in the hands of crazed denialists prepared to go to the wall for the right not to wear a mask.  But actually it's made possible
 the government's truly scary Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, waved through in the wake of the softening up offered by Covid 'necessities'.
 
In sum there is huge gap where the left should have been designing, advocating and enacting a progressive libertarian approach to Covid, and the authoritarian capitalist state is gleefully sailing straight into it.

    Andrew Dobson

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