That is why people who lived in conditions of full employment, with low housing and transport costs and access to basic health and social provision, mostly tell opinion pollsters they are now worse off than under Communist rule. It’s hardly surprising in the circumstances that 85 per cent of Russians regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Similarly Leonid Brezhnev – Soviet leader in the 1970s, known as the era of stagnation, but also a period when living standards were rising – was picked out as the outstanding Russian politician of the twentieth century.10
Russians have seen their country reduced from a superpower to a nuclear-armed basket case in a decade, and hatred of the West has grown as its role in that process has been driven home. For the rest of the world, the impact of the Soviet abdication a decade ago has been no less profound. The removal of the only state that could challenge the power of the US militarily, even if it bled itself white by doing so, drastically narrowed the room for manoeuvre for everybody else.
The winding down of nuclear and strategic confrontation under Gorbachev allowed states like Britain to cut military spending, but also created the conditions for untrammelled US power in a unipolar world, while potentially more volatile nuclear threats emerged. It is difficult to imagine the Gulf War of 1991 and the subsequent throttling of Iraq or the dismemberment and inter-ethnic wars of Yugoslavia taking place, let along Bush’s current rush to unilateralism, if the Soviet Union had not been on its knees or extinct.
For developing countries, in particular, the destruction of the second superpower – which had championed the anti-colonial movement and later the third world cause – largely closed off the scope for different alliances and sources of aid and sharply increased their dependence on the West. Throughout the world, the removal of the ideological challenge represented by the Soviet Union dramatically weakened the labour movement and the left – and even confidence in political ideas of any kind, something that is only now beginning to change.
Perhaps it is still too early, as the Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution, to make a considered assessment of the seventy years of Soviet power: its achievements, failures and crimes, its legacy to progressive politics and the search for an alternative social model. The particular form of society it created will never be replicated, nor will the conditions that gave rise to it. But the effects of its destruction will be with us for decades to come.
(16/8/01)
The return of anti-capitalism
The signal for yesterday’s May Day madness – the mobilisation of 10,000 police to corral a few thousand anti-capitalist protesters, plus a handful of headbangers – was given by the prime minister almost a year ago. By any objective reckoning, the televised trashing of McDonald’s and daubing of a Winston Churchill statue last time around scarcely amounted to an orgy of street violence. But Tony Blair was adamant. ‘This kind of thing cannot happen again,’ he declared, as jail sentences were handed down for crimes such as throwing a plastic bottle, painting slogans and using threatening behaviour.
This year, the Met have got the message. In an orchestrated climate of absurdist and self-fulfilling hysteria about the threat of ‘atrocities’ from US-trained anarchists, public opinion was duly softened up for yesterday’s New Labour police operation, complete with terrifying mugshots of alleged rioters, excitable talk about rubber bullets and mutterings about the Real IRA using the demonstrations as cover for a bomb attack.
Fresh from his hostile reception at Sunday’s South African Freedom Day concert, Blair was at it again on Monday, accusing protesters of planning to inflict ‘fear, terror, violence’, while Jack Straw denounced the ‘evil people’ behind last year’s ruck. No doubt being seen to crack down hard on an apparently unpopular target looks like a sensible move in the run-up to an election in which Labour will be attacked for its record on crime. But by dismissing the ideas behind yesterday’s demonstrations as a ‘spurious cause’, the prime minister made clear he does not simply want to demonise riotous protest, but also the increasingly influential anti-corporate movement that has fuelled them.
It is, of course, much easier to shock the bourgeoisie than to overthrow it, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm put it. And while a few ‘hardcore’ anti-capitalists appear to have succeeded in shocking the powers-that-be – or at least cabinet ministers and the tabloid press – they can hardly imagine that throwing stones at the police or smashing shop windows is going to shake the capitalist order. The only political violence that has ever achieved its aims has been either spontaneous or decisive: anything else merely tends to weaken the cause of those carrying it out. Groups that want a barney with the police have always attached themselves to large-scale demonstrations – whether against the Vietnam war, poll tax or apartheid – and the anti-corporate protests are more than usually vulnerable to such diversions because of their highly decentralised, ultra-democratic forms of organisation.
But far more significant in the longer run than apportioning blame for yesterday’s clashes is the fact that ten years after the end of the cold war and the supposed global triumph of liberal capitalist ideas, the international workers’ day has again become a focus of international protest, animated yesterday by a common political agenda from London to Sydney, Moscow to Seoul: rejection of neoliberal globalisation, opposition to the eclipse of democracy by corporate power and demand for international action to tackle the ecological crisis. Even by simply making the slogan of anti-capitalism common currency, the movement has raised the possibility of a systemic alternative, derided as a nonsense for most of the past decade.
And far from being a minority cause, the central concerns of the anti-corporate movement are becoming mainstream, finding support far beyond the ranks of environmentalists, animal rights activists and global economic justice campaigners on the streets of London and other British cities yesterday. This week’s NOP poll for Channel 4 found most people believe multinational companies have more power over their lives than Blair’s government, and that the corporate giants care ‘only about profits and not the interests of the people in the countries where they operate’.
The weakness of the anti-corporate movement, in Britain at least, is not so much that it lacks a common world view or programme of action – something of a strength at this stage – but that it is disconnected from other more socially rooted groups and organisations. A crucial factor behind the impact of the protests at the Seattle World Trade Organisation summit eighteen months ago was the alliance between trade union and direct action campaigners that underpinned them. So far, links have been at the margins of both movements; yesterday’s labour march was kept far from the anti-corporate protests. That is one gap that will have to be bridged if the central social demands of our time are going to be met.11
(2/5/01)
WARS ON TERROR AND TYRANNY (2001–02)
George Bush and Tony Blair launched the ‘War on Terror’ by invading Afghanistan on a wave of liberal-interventionist rhetoric. The casual slaughter of Afghan civilians and restoration of warlord rule exposed the campaign’s brutal reality, fuelling al-Qaida-inspired terror across the world. So did Israel’s US-backed onslaught against the Palestinian intifada in the months that followed. The ease of the Taliban’s overthrow also fed a new Western imperial triumphalism, as Bush and the neoconservatives prepared to settle accounts with Iraq and its ‘axis of evil’. The 9/11 aftermath had been rapidly transformed into a war to enforce US ‘full spectrum dominance’ across the globe.
Bush’s ocean of petrol on the flames
As US and British forces prepare to strike against the humanitarian disaster that is Afghanistan, the problems confronting George Bush’s