Ken MacLeod has a dicussion up, at Early Days of a Better Nation, of a question I raised. I raised it at the end of my recent post on Paul Berman's Dissent article. The question was:
Why does this particular thematic combination lead so many [on the socialist far left] to come down each time on the side they do - morally and politically, in my own view, the wrong side?And the 'thematic combination' I was referring to there was:
America, as foremost representative of global capitalism, on one side, and (speaking loosely) regimes and movements of an utterly ghastly kind politically, on the other...I have the following comments to make in response to Ken's post.
First, he suggests that my question was rhetorical, but it wasn't. It's a question I mean to offer an answer to in due course, and one of the purposes of my discussion of Berman was to delineate the question clearly for myself before answering it - although Ken wasn't to know this.
Second, the answer Ken himself gives to the question - in a nutshell, anti-imperialism - is one I already know, of course. But it's not an answer at the level of analysis I myself am aiming for. I'm interested in what it might be about the Marxist and other (broadly left) theoretical outlooks in which anti-imperialism is a large, and quite proper, concern, that so minimizes, if not completely evacuating, all competing considerations.
Third, Ken writes that he is not concerned with whether the viewpoints and political positions which he reviews in brief are 'correct or not'. Well, if he says he's not concerned with this, I'll accept that he genuinely doesn't mean to be. But I will suggest, nonetheless, that an unintended subtext of some of what he says is that those of us who would want to distinguish between, say, the NLF's struggle in Vietnam, ZANU's in Zimbabwe, the ANC's in South Africa and the MPLA's in Angola, on the one hand, and the Taliban or al-Qaida's efforts in Afghanistan and beyond, the activities of Milosevic and his friends, and the Saddam Hussein regime, on the other - that we're being a bit morally pernickety. Naturally, I don't accept this subtext, whether or not it's Ken's intended meaning. To take just one of these cases, I supported the ANC's struggle against apartheid as being the struggle of a genuine liberation movement; something which the Taliban and all the rest in the above sorry (second) list were, or are, not. At the same time, I never supported the use of 'necklacing' and suchlike; indeed I explicitly criticized it at the time (click on 'Past Volumes', then on 1989; or see my Discourses of Extremity, chapter 2) - as certain well-known left voices supporting the Iraqi so-called 'resistance' today conspicuously do not distance themselves from the openly murderous activities of this said 'resistance', which involve organized and deliberate crimes against humanity.
Fourth, and finally, in an odd and to me not altogether transparent closing paragraph, Ken alights on the area in which at least part of my answer to my own question will be focused when it comes, but he does so not in a manner that I find either persuasive or congenial. He talks about (political) morality, saying:
Morality is real. Morality is ideology. It is the heat given off by the workings of quite different machinery. In measuring the heat while ignoring the mechanism - in making a moral case for or against a particular war, for example - the moral philosopher reasons 'consciously indeed, but with a false consciousness'. The screams of those caught in the machinery continue unabated. They cry to heaven. It is only in what Locke called the 'appeal to heaven' - the clash of arms - that anyone... sees a hope that some day the machinery can be made to stop, and the screams to cease. That hope itself is the machines' fuel.I am perplexed by the final sentence here, but otherwise would say this. Ken's treating morality as ideology, false consciousness, is in the right ball park (for the question of mine he's responding to) but it's there in the wrong way. That is to say, it's part of the problem in the outlook he's seeking to explicate, and here also seemingly endorsing. I know where it comes from. It was always, even in the best hands, one-sided. It should by now have been utterly discredited. To the extent that it still inhabits the thinking of the left, that is dismaying. We should have got beyond it.
Moreover, it is a manifest self-deception, including in this paragraph of Ken's. Purporting to raise the writer or speaker who deploys it above the mere 'heat' given off by the mechanism - while all the rest of us flail about believing this heat to be the central thing - the morality-as-ideology discourse still permits that person to insinuate their own superior moral judgement. This comes in the way they speak about the mechanism to which the heat is said to be secondary. Here, it comes with the phrase 'screams of those caught in the machinery'. That's the concern of others than yourself, Ken. As it happens, it brings to my mind something else than - something as well as - the depredations of imperialism.