“To conclude is not merely erroneous, but ugly.”
Nick Land

Watching revelers crowd out into the streets of New York and Washington – not the Midwest or the deep South but those most stereotypically liberal bastions of America – to cheer the death of Osama bin Laden, I can’t help but recall the scenes of celebration in Middle Eastern streets that were drilled into our skulls directly after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Although there are any number of obvious differences between 9/11 and the death of bin Laden, not least the fact that the former was a mass slaughter of civilians while the latter is a targeted execution of a murderous reprobate, I feel, nonetheless, that there is something oddly symmetrical about the two moments. What made those images of Arab euphoria feel so cold-blooded and anti-American – why they were so deliberately fetishised by the Western media as the “true nature” of our new enemy, to the almost complete exclusion of the more obvious, general, stunned, grim, mournful and shared disorientation in the Middle East over what this disaster would mean for the world, over what would happen now that the United States had been forced out into a globalisation based upon a terrific violence which the American Empire itself had largely administered from behind a wall of self-possessed untouchability we were beginning to believe could never be breached, what it meant to watch America join the world in trauma – and why it was, then, that those scenes were so understandably painful to Americans – could be found precisely in the fact that they displayed a wide cross-section of ordinary Arab people championing a ruthless atrocity as though it were a sterling blow for justice, as if justice could claim this act in its name. Truth be told, today, as before 9/11, and despite all the Western misinformation that has presented him as an Islamic folk hero, there has been next to no love for bin Laden in the Arab world, even among his fellow jihadis, for just in terms of the body count alone – both direct and indirect – that he has incurred through his actions, we should recall he has been a pitiless killer of Arabs before anything else. So it is, no doubt, that the Arab world, moving off on its own track in recent revolution and seditious revolt, will also feel relief to find this necropolitical presence has finally been obliterated from the world scene. And yet, though there is, surely, a common feeling around the globe that bin Laden’s death is no sorry event, a sentiment not limited merely to New York and Washington, I can’t help but wonder how all this celebration on our part must look to a Middle Easterner recalling the epithets we flung at the Arab world after seeing their cheering crowds, our slanderous insistence that it showed beyond all question how the Arab street was fanatical, irrational, bloodthirsty and fueled only by hate. I can’t help but think that this Arab street – which, to put it drily, has been forced down a steep learning curve during the last ten years by our military intensification of the art of discipline – must be asking itself now whether we have learned anything at all from the disaster which befell America on that day in September, ten long years ago. For, in the end, is not President Obama’s insistence that the death of bin Laden signals a blow for justice a sign in itself that we continue to reserve the right to validate our own acts of bloody retribution as morally righteous? It is not the case that we, just like the Arab crowds that day, have come out to celebrate the conflation of the two things and, what’s more, to claim the right to celebrate like this in the name of justice itself? What are we to make of military murder being presented not as an act of revenge, but praised as a great accomplishment, a new chapter in the annals of universal peace and rectification of wrongs, an authentic mission accomplished?

Allow me to clarify myself a little. What I am not trying to assert is that murdering bin Laden was wrong by definition – that is, to condemn it from the standpoint of an absolute pacifism, or an absolute opposition to the sin of murder, or from the alibi of an absolute humanism that would sentimentally, though insincerely, hold all human life – even the worst kind of human life – to possess intrinsic and equal value to me. On the contrary, I am more than happy to say that Osama bin Laden’s death marks, in my eyes, a rare tick upward in the quality of the world we live in. Moreover, if bin Laden was killed by a unilateral and summary military action – an action that may be, in a word, quite criminal from the position of civil laws – I likewise don’t feel the unilateral or summary nature of that action makes it automatically immoral – not, that is, if bin Laden was to be understood as a lawful combatant, subject to the rules of engagement in war, of which I’ll have more to add in a moment. Finally, despite the military-analytical insistence from the commentariat that bin Laden has, for some time now, been a non-issue in terms of the strategic aims of the war of terror, there is actually a strong strategic gain in his death not in terms of the war on terror but against the coherence of that war itself. Indeed, although progressively marginalized as a threat by our authorities, and, indeed, not nearly as powerful as he ever was presented, Bin Laden has nevertheless remained quite vital, symbolically speaking, to both terrorist and counter-terrorist crusading, through the ideological unity his absent presence has provided to the otherwise floating signifer of “al-Qaedaism”. His “brand”, as it were, has served as a means of integration for fractious, isolated Islamist fundamentlist terrorist acts, making them into a holistic cause with an integrative appeal both for would-be terrorists and will-be counter-terrorists. In a sense, it flattened the detachment of one act of terror from another in logistical and political terms, the lack, that is to say, of any sustained interagential intimacy between the teacher and the acolyte, between the agenda-setters and their agents, that defines such terror networks – in perhaps a defining instance of what Geert Lovink has called the “uncanny networks” of late capital – and acted as cynosure for the idea of an ultimate orchestration or goal-driven ensemble of terrorist acts. Therefore, while he has largely been off stage and underground ever since he vanished from the image in the aftermath of the opening stages of the Afghanistan war, the figural coherence of bin Laden as the ghost in the machine has remained quite at hand, forefronted, most of all, in the way we in the West have largely fabricated the disorganized plurality of regional, domestic, international or intracultural terrorist groups and actions into a catch phrase caricature, a singular unit, “al-Qaeda”, a slippery beast which, like the classic octopus of propaganda posters, works precisely so as to smooth the ideological factionalism and specific, unamenable aims of fundamentalist terrorist groups into an automated blanket menace arrowed not at their own fantastic outcomes but always directly at us. In this way, the death of bin Laden as the Master Signifier will likely bring with it a sharp decline in symbolic efficiency around the idea of al-Qaeda as a meaningful explanatory entity for terrorist acts, a consequence the ever-cynical Bush administration signalled it knew all too well in its incurious whateverness toward bin Laden’s whereabouts or fate, but which Obama, with his professed anti-Iraq war interest in winding the war on terror back down to its origins, rather than ubiquitously extending its ambit, could not, it seems, despite the powerful dividends of ignorance, prevent himself from needing to know.

Even taking all of this into account, however, if it is one thing to say that the murder of bin Laden can be understood as a kind of good and to accept that it is not a crime from the perspective of the waging of war, nor a war crime insofar as it has not involved the torture of combatants or the mass murder of civilians (although one innocent woman died, as if always to tether such “clinical” strikes to the minimum wage of noncombatant bloodshed, the criminal immanence, that should make them only ever extraordinary tactics), it is absolutely another thing altogether to argue that such an act of enemy elimination is, by consequence, just. For this act of military murder – no, the apparatus of military murder generally, and its shifting borders of atrocity, of which we have seen yet another greusome and garish example just recently in Afghanistan – only finds itself vindicated due to the fact, ten years on, there is still no proper system of justice set up that could have coherently dealt with bin Laden in any more scrupulous way than simply killing him. While it remains to be seen whether bin Laden was murdered in the course of an honest effort to apprehend him, or whether he was actively and deliberately executed in custody (which would, of course, constiutute a war crime), I’d suggest, either way, that the whole logic of the war on terror has functioned on the presumption that his death or his disappearance is preferable to his live capture or his presentation to the courts. And to understand why this might be so, all we need do is simply consider what would have followed if he had, indeed, been taken alive. Most certainly, as with all the other ‘unlawful combatants’ scooped up by the hand of justice before him, bin Laden would first have vanished into the CIA’s secret prison system or been sequestered in Guantánamo, there to fester not only as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks but as the definitive symbol of the lack of any effort on our own part to follow the system of due process, to respect the most basic rules of habeas corpus, and, at bare minimum, to construct a series of independent military tribunals that would bring to the war on terror something other than the utterly arbitrary punishments which now apply everywhere in it. Can we picture, then, the running sore of attention and political drama bin Laden’s presence in the extralegal prisons of the United States would have brought to bear on the unconscionable contradictions of that extralegal space itself? Can we imagine how his incarceration would have raised intense questions about the ongoing need for those prisons, as well as made blatant the fact they aren’t doing the job of bringing the evil-doers to justice – since justice, by definition, can’t and isn’t meant to reach them in Guantánamo? This interdicted prospective scenario matters, because we can be quite sure that an apprehended bin Laden would have triggered a great public demand for him to face a proper trial, either in a civilian court, or the Hague, or in a Nuremburg style military inquest. There would, I believe, have been a widespread unwillingness to accept indefinite detention as a sufficient outcome in bin Laden’s case, either in terms of adequate closure or a just resolution to his crimes, especially given the way he has been turned into the very antithesis of all that the free world’s lawfulness ostensibly represents. However, if Obama had decided to bring bin Laden to trial in such a court, the whole logic behind Guantánamo’s state of exception would have erupted into general crisis – since what grounds could exist for inflicting the higher, unadjudicated punishment of infinite detention on those incarcerated who are, axiomatically, lower down the chain of command than bin Laden? Are these lesser detainees to remain detained even as their notional leader is being delivered over to face the fineries of a legal prosecution? Think, too, of the problems attendant upon subjecting someone so obviously and demonstrably guilty as bin Laden to the kangaroo court proceedings of the current system of “military commissions”, with their unabashed tendency to dispose of even the basics of constitutionally guaranteed provisions of legal and evidentary representation in their deliberations. These special commissions don’t merely skirt the edges but thoroughly junk the the very notion of justice that a trial against bin Laden would have to invoke, unavoidably, in subjecting him to the deliberations of a court that would aim to convict him. Paradoxically, the absolute guilt of the guilty renders a show trial insupportably obscene.

The post-9/11 maw of sovereign lawlessness is, consequently, not a seperate issue from bin Laden’s death but exactly what cannot be seperated out from this lovely little execution, a killing which, we must acknowledge, assumes its full meaning in the context of a fundamental immunity of counterterrorist punishment to be held to any consistent application of law – an immunity established at the moment Bush deemed the adversary to be neither criminal nor combatant, but both and none, coupled together with an autoimmunity simultaneously established in the same moment that has amalgamated the police and the military functions together, and fuelled the flat refusal to apply any standard of rule-bound justice to the war on terror, or to cede power to the justice of any rule-bound standard. There is an unseemly premeditation to the fact bin Laden is dead, then, in that his death crowns the rejection, from the very first, of developing a just way to convict him. As such, even if his fate is all too richly deserved, to brand this blatant act of murder a thing of justice is to beatify a counterterrorist politics that has, in fact, worked furiously to close off every road to justice before it, not least in its insistence on turning law-inscribed adversaries into pre-emptively insupportable life. It is one thing to feel a sense of gratification at the destruction of a destroyer. That is understandable, even acceptable. But let us not be tricked into raising mere comeuppance to the level and stature of a spurned, still-absent justice.

“Goodness is in a certain sense comfortless.”
– Franz Kafka

As the Libyan uprising has come unstuck – at least in this, its first wave, and what we can only hope will not be its last wave – so too has another front abruptly crumbled. From the glowing superdensity of its solidarity with the transformational moment in Egypt, where its anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary tendencies were on the move together, the Left has abruptly disassembled into a confused and contrarian disarray over Libya. All of a sudden, the uprising has brought anti-imperialism to an impasse, in the Transitional National Council’s call for intervention; while pro-revolutionary passion puts from its mind the fact that Western hegemony stands predictably ready, in the name of revolution, to prevent revolution from coming to pass. The division in positions is not fatal – this does not have the dynamics of the 1999 bombing of Serbia all over again, which goes to show, if nothing else, the distance that exists between the highly decisional nature of a liberal intervention and the compulsory commitments to the Left commanded by a genuine revolutionary event. Nonetheless, the difference in opinion has also worked to reaffirm the worst prejudices amongst Leftists about the mainstream Left’s doughy lack of ideological fidelity, on the one hand, and the intellectual grandstanding and dogmatic stubbornness of the far Left, on the other. Yet, in the face of such lapses into lazy intra-Leftist slander, perhaps the most urgent point to make, a point that both the anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary camps seem unwilling so far to accept, is that neither one of their positions is entirely misplaced nor, for that matter, off base in their critique of the other. Quite frankly, the heart of the dilemma facing us with Libya lies in the fact that when it comes to these two alternatives, a choice between market-state intervention or revolutionary collapse, there can be only one authentic initial reaction: following a remark of Stalin’s, disinterred by Žižek, to look at both options and declare “both are worse”. For just this reason, we must approach the question of which one to choose not in search of a least worst option but with comprehension that we currently have to hand two options worse than one another. From the perspective of Qaddafi v. the West, it is critical to make the point that, while the choices are not equal in terms of a choice of systems (dictatorship v. liberal democracy), they are far more ambiguous in terms of a choice of fates – a case, therefore, not of the proverbial frying pan versus the fire so much as the garrotte versus the noose. Our overriding priority accordingly – whether pro-revolutionary or anti-imperialist – must be to assess the looming alternatives of the enemy not on the basis of their moral preferability one over the other (the question of the lesser evil) but on the grounds of evaluating the amount of contingency that still remains available within each of them for the revolution to continue to stage a victorious confrontation with both opponents. Our task is not – and ought not to have been – to assume that such contingency has already been definitively terminated by the turn of events, though we must understand the limitations that bear down upon the revolution from all angles. Our duty, rather, is to use our critical understanding of the constraints weighing upon this moment to determine what is now required, under the shadow of dual destructions, for the revolution to pull off an improbable escape from each one in turn – irregardless of whether, in practice, it achieves such a breakthrough or not.

Since the notion of a No-Fly-Zone (NFZ) was first aired, I’ve crossed backward and forward between the respective positions quite erratically, and with ever greater agitation since the setbacks began. Even as I have fretted over the ideological transfigurations that carry one away from the Left and into what Richard Seymour memorably describes as “the moralisation of the means of violence”, that ethics of force which turns anti-imperial criticality over into the intellectual acid vat of liberal militarism, I have also wondered about the permutations of revolutionary need and asked myself whether the very fact that liberal intervention is a force that pluralises, rather than secures one against, precarity is not in itself a means for preservation in this – though only in this – moment: a moment when precarity is about to tip over into basic butchering restorationism of the Qaddafi regime itself. I should acknowledge that the NFZ did have some pull on me even before the uprising found itself being thrown back to Benghazi. While my default leaning has been – and continues to be – staunch opposition to any Western-led intervention, there was also the difficulty that another confected “intervention” – in the use of hired mercenaries – was being ruthlessly deployed against the uprising by Qaddafi and it complicated my sense that this would not require any outside military assistance to attain victory. It did so in two ways: firstly, to whatever degree Qaddafi’s resurgence has been the result of these mercenaries – and we ought to proceed carefully in assuming it has been at all crucial in terms of their sheer numbers or fighting capacity as opposed to its racialised rhetorical power in channelling a notion of black anarchy in Libya, a power which has been deftly exploited by Qaddafi himself, who in his scattershot attack on every element from drug lords to al-Qaeda has implied an inherently mercenary connection between such disparate blocs – the presence of any mercenaries whatsoever reinforces the point that this regime is not one to be broken through qualms over how far it will have to go to remain in power: from hiring executioners to bombing its own cities, it has become fundamentally necropolitical. The question of its removal, then, depends radically on its capability, not its willingness, to, in a direct reapplication of Brecht’s old phrase, “dissolve the people and elect a new one”. Secondly, whether, again, the importation of mercenaries has been substantial in number, whether it has been voluntary or conscripted or whether it is even existent in any significant degree at all, the idea of it has worked, as we can now see, to reinforce the image of Qaddafi as a leader entrenched enough not to be able to be defeated by virtue of sheer popular will alone and thus also as someone to whom the question of loyalty remains a relevant question. The corollary point to this is that such uncertainty over his chances at retaining sovereignty would have introduced as relevant a calculus, a certain arithemetic through which one would have to weigh joining the ranks of the revolution against the best interests not only for one’s future safety but for one’s ideological investments (i.e. will my actions against Qaddafi inadvertently lead our nation into a disaster zone like Afghanistan or Iraq?). In this respect, the deliberate introduction of mercenaries – whether as figment or fact – has accelerated the violent cyclonics that turn popular uprisings into a “civil war” – itself a comparative advantage for Qaddafi, who moves from tyrant to leader of a “side”. Combined together, these speculations left me in deep doubt as to whether a NFZ might not be of actual value in cancelling out the advantage, rhetorical or logistical, that the mercenary wild card was providing.

However, what seemed even more clear to me, at that stage, and much more verifiable, was that the moral right of intervention was already being bandied about with an acrobatic and tendentious combination of good guy moral urgency and cavalier abstraction of any urgent or immanent concept of the propensity toward oppression that defines liberal interventionism through and through. “Even if we intervene,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in late February, “we will not have democratized Libya. Libya will have democratized Libya. And it is both our moral duty and our strategic responsibility to align ourselves with this emerging and emancipated Libya.” What radiates here, of course, is the lack, completely, of the thought that democracy might not follow in any way from our intervention – whether from the Libyans or from us. That, indeed, while our efforts could help remove Qaddafi, the idea that such a removal must give over necessarily into some improved, thereafter-entity we can simply dub “democracy” – that a true democratic transformation might be about much more than that – is exactly what goes to show not a thing has been learnt by liberal interventionists in either Afghanistan and Iraq. An intervention may have had the appearance of a support operation – and certainly is not tantamount to colonial occupation – but, even at an the earliest stage, would also have come at the cost of abridging an important symbolic dimension of these uprisings: that they are, as Tim Morton has pointed out, “revolutions in the name of universal human values from which the orientalist West excluded the other for two centuries, thus making those places such as Egypt suddenly emerge in front of the West.” The Wieseltier argument is – entirely – about American moral authority, American leadership, American reinsertion of itself at the head of the game, as though this were a game, a match of which all the angles ought to be played. Further, though he later savages Obama for his disinclination (whatever its basis might be) to scramble at the drop of a hat into a sterling opportunity for a liberal intervention, thereby making the world, so says Wieseltier slanderously, “safer for many atrocities”, there is also an explicit refusal to factor in whether the liberal intervention these hawks have spent the last two decades swooping after would, with a disinvested leader, possess the competency to be done right, as Anne Applebaum, a right-leaning liberal who opposes the intervention, insists. For our purposes, we need not limit the doubts to something merely as technical as competence. Rather, we should extend our scepticism to the role of outright hypocrisy in the energies that have manifested around this Western military option. As socialist activist Simon Assaf has pointed out, “In the first days of this uprising, rebels made four demands on [the] international community: 1) Recognition of the Transitional National Council. 2) Access to sequestrated funds. 3) Weapons to defend themselves. 4) Halt to the mercenary flights. [The] answers they got [were]: 1) We only recognise countries; 2) [It’s] not that easy; 3) No, because of Al-Qaeda; 4) No law against ‘security contractors’.” It’s important to realise that such obstructionism is not only indicative of the realpolitik and legalistic considerations of the power arrangements that exist behind that breezy word ‘intervention’ – or, following Alexander Galloway, the protocols one has to accept to become stage an action in the system, that then direct the type of network connections and disconnections it is possible to make – the protocols which, unless they too are “intervened” upon, or, better, overturned, do indeed run a good risk of compromising the autonomy of the assisted. No, moreover, it has already been predicated upon a particular ideological enclosure of options – for instance, in the logic that any intervention ought to exercise a strict control over the assisted’s autonomy when it comes to the prospect of arms distribution to Islamists even though they are democrats too in this uprising against authoritarianism. Because the Wieseltiers as much as the neoconservatives see in Islamism a mere theocracy in waiting, the very impediments upon our assistance to this uprising have already stemmed, in good part, from our need to vet it for allegiances to our already imposed notion of what its future democracy should look like. And the real trouble here is not, obviously, that one would want to distribute weapons like candies and ubiquitously arm any militant faction – up to and including “al-Qaeda” – but that what gets called “al-Qaeda” is folded into “Islamism” and what gets called “Islamism” is folded into “terrorism” when, in fact, as Susan Buck-Morss has noted, “Islamism is not terrorism. It is the politicization of Islam in a postcolonial context, a contemporary discourse of opposition and debate, dealing with issues of social justice, legitimate power, and ethical life in a way that challenges the hegemony of Western political and cultural norms”. Therefore, as she goes on, “social movements that express themselves within Islamist discourse are frequently in opposition to each other, as their forms of activism span the entirety of the known political spectrum – from terrorist networks, to right-wing authoritarianism, to neo-liberal centrism, to left-radicalism, to secular-state egalitarianism, to guerrilla warfare.” One consequent point of this, being, ironically, that the Transitional National Council almost certainly already has continuities with “Islamism” even as it seems fairly palatable to Western tastes. And another consequent point being, not so ironically, that liberal interventionists would almost certainly not be beating the same drum, but lamenting the “tragedy of Libya” and framing massacre as the consequences of an “internal power struggle”, were it the case that what they mean by Islamist (either a far Left or a conservative movement that operates in distinct opposition to liberal-capitalism itself) stood in the place of the Transitional Council right now, calling for rescue from an impending massacre. Or, perhaps, on the other side of their flagrantly bipolar spectrum, they’d be arguing for a full-blown military invasion against both Qaddafi and the Islamists, for in that scenario it would be “the universal thirst for liberation”, not the “autonomy of the assisted” that would be their brandished, cherished, tattered slogan.

That was then. For better or worse, the moment to support an early NFZ has gone. Now the setbacks have turned the situation on its head again. The urgency of intervention has gathered a new salience, not cancelled out simply by the mendacities and cosseted aggression of liberalism alone. Given the casual atrocities Qaddafi has already blithely inflicted upon the uprising so far, as well the man’s known willingness not to end violence merely with pacification of open opposition but to pursue it even into prison, there is no reason at all to doubt he will not keep to his word and deliver down a sanitizing slaughter upon Benghazi. This, however, does not suddenly erase any of the points already made about the violent selectivity of liberal policy or its seemingly infinite capacities for self-deception as to the divisiveness and unrepresentativeness of its motives. Generally speaking, then, in a situation where both alternatives on offer are worse than one another, the appropriate response should seem to follow from Adorno’s old dictum: “Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.” However, as notable Australian Leftist intellectual Guy Rundle has rightly argued in one of his articles making the case for intervention, “There is no such thing as a non-response, in this case. To say ‘this demands further study’ is an answer – and the answer is no. To be silent, because the request throws your politics into contradiction is an answer – and the answer is no.” Therefore, while I want to argue that there remains room to abjure the prescribed choices, it will require, uncomfortably, that we on the Left, whoever we are, each individually make one. But I would like to suggest that it will involve a scenario where together we make both. In saying that we must choose one of the options each, but must choose also to remain aligned, the nature of the dispute changes. It becomes, that is, not an exercise in ideological rigour nor a gatekeeping clash over the truly ethical alternative between white or black. On the contrary, it is to opt, in either direction, for the already existent enmirement of each option in the imperial architecture that is our power in the West to actually assist, on the one hand, and our structural imperative to fight against our involvement, as resisters of Western hegemony, on the other. The choice facing the Left must be a decision, in other words, that looks away from the lens of realpolitik – a lens which contends a best worst solution is possible, insofar as it thinks itself to be minimizing evil through accomodation with reality’s shades of gray – and focuses instead on the flickering chiaroscuro of two enemies switching their polarities back and forth, like a pair of achromatic chameleons. The only way, I will argue, that we can keep the primacy of each enemy in our sights, at this crucial point, and – more importantly – in future moments when pressing reality and capitalist blackmail meet, is through assembling a joint front composed of different wings that are ready to offer critical boundaries to one another until such a time – which may come sooner than the supporters of intervention may think – when our anti-imperial and pro-revolutionary ideals are synchronizable across the full membership once again. In arguing the case for supporting the NFZ and the West’s intervention against Qaddafi, Rundle insists we cannot have it both ways. He asserts that the anti-imperialists, in continuing to believe they are in solidarity with the uprising, while opposing their request for our help, have lapsed into paradox:

“Each ‘no’ is a refusal of solidarity, a breach of it. There may well be no other choice. The request may be for action that is utterly futile, vengeful, excessively bloody or demanding too much of a sacrifice. But if the request is legitimately made, of a legitimate type and is not onerous, then the continued expression of solidarity demands that you act on it.

Solidarity is an activity, not a passive condition. You can’t, as John Passant suggested, “side” with the Libyan revolutionaries, like it’s a Swans match, and call that solidarity. That is mere spectatorship – worse, it’s a way of getting a mild political buzz off their struggle, whilst refusing to help them.”

In strict refusal of Rundle’s moralistic contention, I would insist that “siding” at a distance with the Libyan revolutionaries is exactly what we need part of the Left to do, that this is absolutely not a refusal of solidarity, even as we need another part of the Left to support intervention and “side” – as if at a Swans Match – with anti-imperialism. Crucially, we need to avoid the destructive polarization that would close out the critical flaws in our respective positions because it is mutual recognition of those flaws that can keep us ready to modulate our responses across the divide and to proceed in unity, without either legitimizing intervention as the authentic Leftist response in totality or, alternatively, retreating into a self-certainty that blanks out identification of opportunities for new action by seeing intervention as so deterministically fatal a blow to the authenticity of the Libyan revolution that there is, in effect, no more revolution to be supported. Most of all, it is vital that the pro-revolutionary Left also remember that upholding our awareness of the imperial involvement that accompanies intervention provisions a common ground for a renewed, and even more radical, push against the expansion of intervention in its immediate wake. For what intervention brings with it is democracy, maybe, but, if so, it is democracy in the service, as Alain Badiou has once described it, of compulsory corruption, of “the constant resort to ‘business’, secret diplomacy and crooked deals, as well as the ostentatious display of the power of money, the potentially limitless universe opened by wealth”. And this truth cannot simply be dumped overboard as too much inconvenient ballast to deal with in the face of a maniac – especially when both said maniac and an imperial project are relying expressly on that premise to woo legitimacy their respective ways.

One possible rejoinder to the workability of a joint front might be to say that it papers over a true division, that, for example, it is based on a certain acceptance of the current balance in opinion on the Left, in which the majority appears to favour intervention, and the minority stands opposed to intervention, as though, for the minority, this were not a key part of the problem and the grounds for dividing. Furthermore, for the anti-imperialist position, not only does the pro-intervention position add to the common sense, as opposed to good sense, of the intervention, providing a screen against misgivings about it, but it also seems to have its own ideological scores to settle with its compatriots, insofar as it seeks to frame its own positive response to the situation in Libya against an abdication of conscientiousness among the anti-imperialists and then to accredit this to their hardcore or doctrinaire inflexibility – which is also to say, their imputedly “unreconstructed” Marxism. Of course, in reality, the greatest threat to the Western Left in this intervention is exactly the jeopardy in which the possibility for inflexibility itself is placed, as we are lured into elasticising the relevance of our ideals in the face of events and are led to abandon another kind of flexibility, the flexibility we need within solidarity so as to hold on to our inflexible ideals when the distortions of reality overwhelm their continuity as compatible orientations. As such, while it is true that there is a hierarchy of influence here in terms of pro-revolutionary and anti-imperial positions and that an inverse balance of opinion would have had the Left opposing the intervention strongly enough, perhaps, to have posed a serious obstacle to its implementation, a premise of my argument is, indeed, that the arrangement of arguments is, in fact, objectively correct at this particular moment – with emphasis placed on the temporal quality of such accuracy. I may already lose some of my comrades with this but I want to argue that the anti-imperialists have failed to convince the majority of Leftists not to fall behind intervention at this specific point for a reason: because, with the revolutionaries facing the impending catastrophe of the revolution being rolled back, blocking intervention would leave us, whether we would like to admit this in its fullest dimension or not, with Qaddafi re-enthroned. And it would lay us open to the accusation from those who survived his revenge – and open to cynical exploitation by the Islamist Right – that we tacitly assisted in a massacre of the people by “our puppet”, that we failed to trust in the revolutionary spirit to turn events – even at this dire stage – around, that we stabbed the uprising squarely in the back, a faint Leftist echo of what happened to the Shia of Iraq, encouraged in their revolt then abandoned, in the wake of the first Gulf War.

Another argument against the practicability of a joint front is that the balance of imperial power weighs disproportionately on the side of intervention, so much so that any support for it provides permissions that must refract, magnify and expand far beyond the apparent neutrality and universal transparency that inheres in the need to intervene to save civilian lives. This objection, validly, goes to a central element in the ideological organization of our time – to the factor of what I will call here humanitarian involuntarism, the way in which one particular precarity or atrocity, either in progress or impending, is presented as decomplicated enough for us to be so overwhelmed by it that we feel compulsively unable not to intervene. This is a set of emotions quite different from the foreign policy framework attendant upon a case like Darfur, where horror moves in step with a sense of foggy bewilderment as to what we can really do, an inertia from the pillars of power itself. We see such a difference in actionable capacities, contemporaneously with Libya, in Bahrain, where a massacre in progress is treated not as an urgent atrocity but a sensitive issue we should lament and protest against but which is not permitted to command the critical mass of sensitivities Libya does – or is not, at least, without us having to overturn the perimeters of our own state’s security strategy in the process. In this way, we are offered an almost laboratory example, in these side by side cases, of how humanitarian involuntarism eclectically operates as a sovereign decision over what counts as horrific external necessity. As Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir has argued in a different context, the objective of such a sovereign decision is to frame

“a state of affairs so as to make what has been a ‘tolerable’ or ‘normal’ situation seem too dangerous or intolerable, to arouse moral and political reactions, and to mobilize assistance. The described process, which has been naturalized or normalized before now, appears as either exceptional or as bearing potentially exceptional consequences. An imaginary threshold that separates a state of disaster or the happening of catastrophe from protracted disastrous conditions is invoked. It might have already been crossed, with or without notice, it may be declared as imminent and too close, but in any case, by the very fact it has been stated, invoking the crossing of this imaginary threshold is an appeal for an exceptional response.”

Absolutely essential here is for us to understand the sense in which Ophir uses the word “imaginary”. It is not the case that the catastrophe or exceptional state of affairs is never authentically at a breaking point; it may well be. Rather, the “threshold” is imaginary insofar as it operates to pull the happening out from the “protracted disastrous conditions” that impel it. This maneuvre, of course, encapsulates the essential acuity of the anti-imperialist Left, that sees very well how revolutionary solidarity between the peoples of the Western and Arab worlds is being parlayed into the old imperial con-job of justified war, through an urgent moral intervention totally shorn clear of the tangibility or pertinence of our imperial history to this moment. Instead, as our air forces mow down the Qaddafi murder squads, it’s all just a “human: thing. And this is surely the difficulty, this act of intellectual, affective and historical erasure through the moral imperative of being presented with a “choice” to help, or not to help, a set of endangered human beings. Nonetheless, while fully acknowledging this ploy, the limit to the anti-imperialist argument for why intervention is a sophisticated contrivance only is simply that we cannot pretend, for this reason, that the imaginariness of the threshold turns the disaster itself into a mere confection, nor can we thereby deny the obvious point that the imperial powers, reserving the dominant monopoly and ready reserve of violence, commerce and technology for themselves, are, as a matter of course, the ones who will also be most likely to possess the means to actually to fend off an imminent catastrophe somewhere in the world. Indeed, as Ophir also contends, the imaginary threshold itself is a “scene of contest, struggle, and dissent, and the claims of a sovereign power, however they are pronounced, are neither primary nor constitutive of this scene. In other words, in a world like ours, the sovereign is not the sole author of the exception, and his word on it is not the last one, although the claim to be such a sole author and to have the last word may be a good way to characterize sovereignty as a special kind of political claim.” For Ophir, such contests around the threshold often actually feed into the disaster-enhancing processes around an emergency – they are more the explanation for its “unintended consequences” than the room it makes for resistance to them. But the point that is nevertheless to also be taken away from his insight is that the state of exception can be upset in forcing the very threshold such contests take place through and around itself off track, distorting and destabilising the space of exception as a whole. To put it another way, this intervention may rely on Western hegemony but we can clearly detect a disorganization in the response that suggests that policy is being made on the run, boding both greater likelihood for disaster and greater opportunities for the revolution to seize back the lead for itself. Crucially, we must recognize too that this emergency has emerged via vectors and agencies that have not sprung out fully formed from the NATO powers. It is, for instance, only as the protestors were stalled and driven back toward Benghazi that it emerged to what degree they were banking on sheer momentum, determination, sufficient freedom from suppression for the populace to keep expressing their rage at fullest force and, finally, the weakness of Qaddafi’s regime to see them through to victory. And, in this light, one can’t help but doubt whether such dramatic actions as launching an ICC investigation into atrocities before Qaddafi had fallen, tacitly recognizing the Transitional Council and coming out in clear support of an insurrection against a man the West found it could deal with quite proficiently in the last decae would really be the cautious actions of an imperial machinery that was not already working on the assumption that the uprising was bound to win. For this very reason, the intervention of the West stems from an outcome that hasn’t materialized as expected and thus, while it is evidently an effort to salvage the wreckage of its own hastiness as well as a scramble to swiftly appropriate the revolution’s lead, it also marks a response to a very real turn of fortunes that those powers didn’t predict. In effect, then, to assess the full role of the West, we have to make a decision as to how to weigh the events that have already taken place: either the revolution, as a revolution, ended at the moment it failed to overturn Qaddafi under its own steam, and needed the Western powers to intervene, like a suddenly bankrupt enterprise placed overnight in the hands of liquidators; or else the consequences of its new “alliance” with the Western powers will only be able to be assessed later on, if the revolutionaries refuse to allow their provisional command structure in Benghazi to reduce the uprising to the dictates of that alliance.

At Lenin’s Tomb, Richard Seymour seems to operate on the presumption that the revolutionary dynamic within the Libyan uprising has crumpled definitively, if not expired entirely. He writes:

“The worst case scenario seems to be that this will fuel the centrifugal forces tending toward partition between a ‘Western’ allied statelet in the east, and a rump dictatorship in the west. Qadhafi has spent years deliberately ‘underdeveloping’ the east to punish these regions and tribal federations for their tendency toward rebelliousness, leaving towns and cities that should be as rich as those in the Gulf states desperately poor, surrounded by shantytowns and slums – and so he has laid the material basis for such divisions. Imperialism creates divisions where none existed before (look at Iraq). This is how it always operates. So it’s implausible that where there already are such divisions, and where such divisions have a direct bearing on the conflict underway, that imperialist intervention would not exacerbate them. This may be the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the Libyan revolution. That’s a worst-case scenario.

The best-case scenario is that people are killed to little avail, and the former regime elements in the transitional leadership have just diverted energies and initiative down a blind alley. I suppose you might object that the best-case scenario is that the air strikes exclusively kill the bad guys, turning the initiative in favour of the revolutionaries, allowing them to seize power, build a liberal democratic state, and the cavalry heads home. And the band played, ‘Believe it if you like’. Look, I’d like to believe it. I’d also like to believe that Obama is a socialist, Hillary Clinton a feminist, and David Cameron a salesman for unsecured personal loans. But the occasions in which imperialism has directly assisted a revolutionary process are rather infrequent, wouldn’t you say? In fact, I suspect you’d be struggling if I asked you to name one.”

While I admire Richard immensely, I think he is short-changing the prospects here. On the one hand, he seems to downplay the radical energies still present on the street. Admittedly, the problems of resupply, organization and strategy are vast. But to cite Simon Assaf: “The rebels have been painted as ‘headstrong’ and ‘hotheads’, a disorganised rabble steaming into battle without any military plan. Yet they are determined to topple the regime. Young rebels have successfully persuaded those conscripted to fight for the regime to switch sides. They have matched Gaddafi’s better-trained and ruthless forces, and won decisive battles against all odds. Die-hard supporters of the regime have launched counter‑attacks and savage repression in areas they control.” All of this seems to drop out of the political scenario for Seymour above, not because he would underestimate the passions and heroism of the revolutionaries, nor look down on them for being headstrong, but because imperialism seems to replace revolution in his analysis, like a switch between coloured frames. Though he does not say it, to believe in the persistence of revolution in these circumstances seems to him naive: something liberal-democratic may emerge – possibly only for the East following a partition – but the revolutionary peak was just out of reach and has now passed away. Thus, the best case scenario he can imagine is one where revolutionary outcomes are already foreclosed, where the standard capitalist democracy and a triumphal, gloating ride-off into the night by the liberal interveners are the two most utopian options left on the table, and which aren’t themselves even likely to happen. But what if the band has a better, and more improbable, tune left to play, one which depends not a whit on whether Obama is a socialist, Clinton a feminist or Cameron the new face of a fair go but hinges, instead, on the prospect that the revolution did not already end when it found itself reversed and that its lack of arms might not matter as much as its radical refusal to accept a settlement that involves Qaddafi remaining in power in any shape or form? In short, what if the reversal does not indicate the limits of this movement’s possible permutations? What if we do not yet know what it can do?

Let me be clear: I am not basing my argument here on sheer credulity, although I will point out that trust in the people is one of the central tenets of our doctrine. I understand how under-resourced and disorganized the movement is. I understand also that an imperial decision as to whether a partition occurs is likely to ignore, override or actively suppress resistance to this decision among the revolutionaries. I also recognise that the emancipatory content of the uprising already risks being damaged beyond repair in indications of the turn against what is perhaps the most excluded and oppressed group in all of Libya: African and immigrant workers. Rather, I am grounding my case for the endurance of the revolutionary process not in ignorance to the deterioration it is already suffering – and may well have been locked into since Qaddafi opened fire on the protestors – but in its very refusal to set aside its goals even to the point of calling on the West. The way, that is to say, it too has actively prolonged the revolutionary space by refusing a certain scripted closing down of its chances. And that, because of this very improbable persistence, it may yet be able to push beyond a reduction to a protectorate or to a settlement, especially if it plays in to the very inexcusability of allowing Qaddafi to remain in power that infuses the demonizing rhetoric – and the justified world solidarity against his reign – that has been generated in our public sphere, using this moral pressure to force the space and time they need to resupply their push from other revolutionary sources in the region. On this count, the fact that the Transitional Council contains within it both conservative Western sympathisers and remnants of the regime is too smoothly glossed over here as amounting to the same thing, for while it is certainly true that the Qaddafi regime was hardly an enemy of the West in its latest years, to make those two points synonymous – sympathisers and mandarins of the establishment – plays down the ideological volatility that has characterized Qaddafi’s attitude toward the Western elites, as well as his deft manipulation of the ever-corrupt Western corridors of power for his own ends. While its involvement with the Qaddafi regime and with the Western powers makes the authority intrinsically reactionary, it does not suggest that the former figures of the regime who are now in the new authority are thereby just sockpuppets waiting to reconnect with Western hands, or that they are bereft of any canny sense of the imperial machinations of the political economy of the West, or lacking in any ability to play the West to advance the Libyan state’s own independent ends. And while the risk of an alliance between the Council and the West to close out workers and the revolutionary Left, once the authority of the Council is stabilised as the key point of social reference, is so plain it’s more observable than forseeable, this lockout does not go to the question of whether both the Council and the West are an enemy against which the Libyan Left would gain more traction than through the political and material privations entailed in a guerrilla war against a triumphant Qaddafi. It is this, more than anything, that motivates me toward the opposite position from Richard’s, toward provisional support for intervention, coupled with ongoing critical alertness to the death already being delivered down by it and all the dirty dealings speedily taking shape. Far from holding the intervention to be a lesser evil, or even the necessary response to an impending massacre only, I see it as the unwilling prop for a space of a subaltern revolution that has opened up by the Libyans themselves and that was about to definitively collapse. This is a space that the imperial intervention itself has to keep open – again, against its will – in its bid to impose the imprimatur of its own liberal-democratic compromise on the scene. It has to side with the prolongation of a political participatory public – a participatory public it will, of course, move as soon as possible to shrink and sequester – precisely so as to win the war against Qaddafi – which I do believe it wants to win, though it would obviously do deals with him should he regain full or partial control: to say the West has an interest in Qaddafi’s defeat is not the same as saying it has a whit of commitment to it. What is clear, however – what I believe we all must feel somewhere within ourselves, in our sheer shared knowledge of how bad a thing it was to see Qaddafi poised on the brink of seizing back Benghazi – is not that his victory would have marked the end of the resistance against him – no doubt, an intense partisan war of some sort would have followed – but that his reinstallation would have signalled, rather, the end of that resistance assuming the form of a people’s movement proper, a movement, that is to say, strung through with subaltern counterpublics that have achieved a zone of open autonomy – no matter how distorted – in which to commonly organize and interact. If Qaddafi had won, we could logically assume that the mantle of resistance would have passed away from the Leftist impulses located around the Libyan youth to an anti-imperial, anti-Qaddafi fundamentalism already militant enough, ideologically cohesive enough and organized enough to turn directly to guerrilla methods. Resultantly, even if the revolution’s opportunity did slam shut when it fell just short of the crest, there is still the problem that an anti-imperial and non-reactionary resistance of some kind will disintegrate to the advantage of the Right in the face of Qaddafi’s reoccupation of the East. What Qaddafi was threatening to slaughter in Benghazi was not civilians or wistful liberal-democrats or even Islamists so much as the fragile, singular aperture of the radical Left revolution, the rare thing that has stirred the people beyond liberal-democracy, Islamism and authoritarian anti-imperialism: the collective self-discovery of the workers, the impoverished, the marginal, the dispossessed, the radical intellectuals, those Qaddafi has called “al-Qaeda”, the “drugged youth”, the “rats” and the “scum” – in short, the most militant and committed and excluded and informed and rejected undesirables turned fighters, the part-of-no-part. And here, while we may yet be witnessing the emergence of a racialisation of revolution which, as Seymour points out, looks to “externalise antagonisms that are inherent to Libyan society” making it seem “as if Qadhafi rules solely through and on behalf of his extended family and ‘tribe’ and with the use of ‘foreigners’, as if the problem with Qadhafi is that he’s some sort of alien coloniser”, the glimmers of a growing persecution of black and immigrant workers should be understood as pointing, in itself, to the reactionary mentality that stands ready to purge the revolution of all traces of its struggling universality and proletarian solidarity precisely by insisting that the revels must adandon the workability of revolution as a model, by arguing that this battle cannot be won any longer in a revolutionary front, from the Left, but only through the closed ranks of war, or the domain of the Right. Therefore, to simply point to Libya’s history and say “it’s different” – to say that it was not the same as Egypt or Tunisia due to its tribal structure, or because of Qaddafi’s especially ideological style of pseudo-revolutionary dictatorship, or because the appearance of racism marks the in-built ideological limitations that have crippled the uprising from the start – might go some way toward accounting for the way events have played out but should not be used as a way to count out the revolution as a misnomer, as a tribal conflict mistook for an insurrection, or a lovely prospect we glimpsed but that was simply never meant to be due to all this reactionary drag. It is such determinative “realism” that we must prevent from overtaking us, the sort of prognostic cynicism that turns the reconnaisance work of understanding contradictions and their likely trajectories into a kind of speculative bet on outcomes, the sort of predictionism that rules out any remaining influence from the Left as a force that can move the people to alter their slide into reaction for the sake of ‘security’. In this regard, while the sequestration of Libya’s fate to imperial administrators, diplomats and business interests is a future we must fight tooth and nail to prevent from taking place, so another future we must just as absolutely refuse, as not in any way a preferable outcome, is the one where a fundamentalist invocation of political Islam becomes the only compelling organizational means of resistance to a restored Qaddafi (and the about-face that is bound to follow from a West keen to “normalize” economic and security ties) even as it oversees the closing down of the revolutionary process itself, through racializing its class contradictions into mere matters of foreign involvements (whether immigrant or imperialist). This is why the pro-revolutionary Left stands back to back with the anti-imperialist Left, though the two sides face off in different directions.

Another strong objection to a key presumption upon which I have based my argument for the necessity of both sides might arise at this point. For it could be rightly said that the political participatory or common space I’m contending the liberal intervention must keep open to establish its own rule, far from preserving scope for revolutionary organization and breakthrough, is much more likely to be the very thing that radicalises the centrifugal nature of the conflict, turning the underdevelopment of the East into a permanent politico-national divide: a bifurcating point, as Richard says, between a liberal-democratic petro-state in the East and a simmering, reduced autocracy in the West. For some, such a prediction may sound extreme but I don’t see this speculation as an overreaction to the gravity of the intervention: after all, such negotiated “settlements” abound in the world of imperial realpolitik, not least when interventionism reaches an impasse; and this intervention, despite all its frills, is absolutely riven with imperial realpolitik. But where imperialism, as Richard rightly contends, creates divisions where none previously existed – often, as Mahmoud Mamdani has argued, achieving this via the very pluralism that liberal-democracy forces open through its reinforcement and discriminatory reapportionment of unequal material interests – and thus, for instance, in our pictured scenario, could slowly turn a people’s revolution into an stalemated antagonism between two new political ethnographies – it is important to remember that Qaddafi’s own angle has been to play up this partition threat, too, exactly so as to disperse the idea that there has even been an abdication from his regime in the East that is not tribal, that the people in West Libya are welcome, free and desired to join, and, just so, to present the origin of the revolution in the East as already a form of manipulated, power-hungry secessionism from the politico-tribal structure. In this respect, my point is not that liberal democracy automatically provides superior conditions (free speech, freedom of assembly, the vote etc.: the usual roll call) for a non-reactionary resistance to realise itself – the state of the Left in any Western country over the last thirty five years puts paid to that! – but rather that Qaddafi must wipe out the full collective of this non-reactionary resistance, while the intervention will attempt to systematically cull it. From this perspective, one might even argue that there exists an elementary difference between the kinds of violence at hand – collective and systemic – that can also be apportioned between two kinds of politics: the necropolitical and the biopolitical. Perhaps the distinction between these two political structures has best and most succinctly defined by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, when he compares “the ancient right to take life and let live” to its modern transmutation into “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death”. Important to keep at the front of our minds when we make such a distinction is the fact that the distribution of mutiliation and death is fundamental to both of these forms of politics, meaning, in turn, that it is not a question of one being more ethically restrained or nonviolent than the other. However, if there is a fundamental difference between them, it would lie in the way that biopolitics politicises the very threshold of death into a reactionary ecology of the living and the dieable, while necropolitics subsumes that threshold within itself so that, to paraphrase Achille Mbembi, life, now considered to be naturally destined for self-destruction, its precarity not only manipulated but fully instrumentalized, can therefore be spent lavishly and criminally. Yet, where Foucault splits this distinction between necro- and biopolitics into ancient and modern forms of power, suggesting a transfer between ritualistic and technocratic means of death, it would be more accurate to see the two forms as constitutively entangled, as always concurrent and contemporary, a matter of civilization and barbarism as upheld in Walter Benjamin’s dictum: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The suspension of the civilized in order to “restore” it is precisely what defines Qaddafi’s ruthless murderousness at this moment, his barbarism, while, on the other side, the intervention seeks to repulse such barbarism – the massacre of civilians – exactly so as to domesticate revolution into the barbarity of its civilization, luridly and simultaneously displayed in Bahrain. It is not, therefore, that Qaddafi’s “underdeveloped” violence is a greater evil than the West’s “developed” brand, nor that the West’s policies cannot, by virtue of their civilization, end up in a bloodbath every bit as atrocious and pitiless as the one Qaddafi has already displayed, but, more specifically, that there is a different temporality of exclusion, enclosure and extermination at work in the biopolitics of the intervention, an unlike timeframe that does not provide anything so absolute as a good prospect for revolutionary victory – the doubling of belligerent forces is not an equation in its favour – but which, nonetheless, must provisionally protect a newly emerged publicity so long as it remains the exterminatory target of Qaddafi’s necropolitical movement, his bid to force Libya back into the private state of himself, body by body.

In a way, then, I am proposing that there exists two unequivalent currents of counterrevolution in Libya, rather than a single holistic regression: two political modalities that fluctuate in pitch and frequency and intensity and, thus, priority – and which cannot, therefore, be merged into one another as mere equals, despite their interchange, without wiping out the specificity of each and simply collapsing them into evils that are of a piece. Again, I must emphasise that this is not to propose that necropolitics falls into an opposed category to biopolitics: more accurately, necropolitics is what takes place when biopolitics suffers a fatal haemorrhage in its organizational logic. Yet, in honesty, it must be recognized that there is a danger in this formulation of defaulting to the West as being in some way intrinsically the lesser evil, or, at least, as less likely to morph into necropolitics, especially at this moment. And the structure of imperialism is such that this is not a thing we can simply take for granted, since imperialism – not to mention the biopolitical ecology it maintains in the first-world liberal-democracies – relies decisively on the lavish and willful squandering of subaltern life on its behalf. In this respect, it will not do – though my own approach is, unavoidably, blinded to the realisation in terms of experiencing its fullest intensity – to see intervention as the less counterrevolutionary of the counterrevolutions. Because, in point of fact, the involvement of the West is strictly Thermidorean in structure, insofar as it stands not for the restoration of the old necrotic regime but for the counterrevolution that emerges from within the revolution itself: it already solicits the refusal of the revolution among the revolutionaries that becomes its betrayal, a betrayal that the political philosophy of liberalism is so adept at orchestrating. Yet I would like to suggest, even so, that there is good reason also not to simply accept this as grounds for the anti-imperial thesis as the only correct way to proceed. For where the homology of a Thermidorean reaction goes wrong is in assuming the veracity of its own pattern in advance. The perspective of the future anterior – where we can tell in advance what will come from the European involvement: deals instead of democracy, property instead of prosperity – can not simply be set aside as mere pissing on our parade, for this moment is not an alternate history and we know what our involvement entails. Still, our opposition to this still coming counterrevolution must be predicated on our saving the revolution from the immediate counterrevolution – the latter one of which the anti-imperialist arm is in danger of failing to appreciate is simply not the same as, or on an unbroken continuum with, the one to come. As a consequence, while the bourgeois and wealth-aspirational and crooked opportunist or even just plain moderate-capitalist elements who wish to turn revolutionary freedom into the “freedom” of mixing their business with the state are to be considered obvious opponents of the revolution, they are not to be confused quite yet for its outright enemies – especially at this endangered point, when they too are among the revolutionary mass, and the revolution itself still has yet to triumph over Qaddafi’s reactionary estate of the masses, his “people’s” aristocracy.

The pro-revolutionary Left cannot be dismissed, therefore, as a mere degeneration of Leftist principles, a backsliding into liberal-capitalist duplicity. It is an absolutely authentic Leftist response to the conditions of this moment. Allow me, by way of a summary, to briefly encapsulate what I feel are its best arguments, as the situation currently stands, with the proviso that the arguments have not always been expressed quite this way by many of its advocates, many of whom (as I will deal with later) have tried to square the circle by arguing down the idea that there is really an imperial logic to the intervention. In the first place, the pro-revolutionary Left pledges the Left to a firm refusal of any realpolitik that would have resigned us to the fate of those on the brink in Benghazi. Simply because humanitarian involuntarism is hypocritical and intervention unavoidably violent, it will not let us count out the truth of the fact that our militaries can, indeed, act to help the revolutionaries as they stand imperilled now. In recognizing this, the pro-revolutionary Left refuses to overmine or undermine the lives pending upon this present moment, even though it understands perfectly well the lives that are saved now may soon be lost to the consequences of the selfsame intervention later. For this very reason, it offers support for the intervention not on the deluded basis that the reactionary contours of an imperial intervention remain to be seen – they can all too clearly be seen – but in the belief that the bloodwork of imperialism, no matter how inevitable, cannot be banked on in advance. And if, through this set of convictions, it finds itself on the same side as liberal interventionists, the pro-revolutionary Left should not cleanly be consigned to their ranks, not only because such slander is short-sighted and grossly sectarian, but because the Left is not offering the same arguments for intervention as the liberals. It is proposing a distinct and separate Leftist justification for why intervention was essential now. More to the point, the pro-revolutionary Left has its eye trained on the Right-wing anti-interventionists, who are not simply to be counted out of the equation now that the military operation has gone ahead. This anti-interventionism of the Right, characterised by the realist establishment of “strategic interests” – the type of crack-in-the-door conservatism we are witnessing from US military brass, that leaves room for a settled negotiation with Qaddafi – is aimed, above all, at containing US interests in the region and avoiding any further acceleration of imperial fatigue. This nodal point of a wider reactionary ecology needs to be openly attacked, not left to machinate unmolested behind the scenes. And this is not least because, if the revolutionaries were to fail to overwhelm Qaddafi, they might be forgiven for thinking that part of why they failed is due to the refusal on the West’s part to act earlier or more comprehensively, the realist conditions placed upon the revolution from the first, as outlined above by Simon Assaf. In this sense, the pro-revolutionary Left does not want the Left to be caught on the opposite side of a revolution split between pro- and anti-intervention sentiments as it understands that pro-intervention desires are emanating from Libyan Leftists too. Secondly, the pro-revolutionary Left refuses to accept Qaddafi as an evil that can be implicitly downgraded in priority, or cast in a supporting role, now that the West has donned its tattered humanitarian plumage and scrambled up on to the stage. It refuses the way that Qaddafi himself would like, and will work, to exploit such a switch in global Leftist energies, attentions and priorities. As such, it has responded positively to the request for help issued by the Libyan Transitional Council, not in the illusion that the Council is authentically representative of a truly democratic cross-section of the revolutionaries but with the understanding that this command structure’s request for assistance is predicated upon three axioms that are commonly accepted by all the revolutionaries. These are as follows: (a) the real exigency of the turn of events against the revolution, and the lack of resources, at this point, with which to alter its course; (b) the obvious desire of Libyans to push on with the revolution, even if they don’t feel intervention is the right path forward and believe that it damages the uprising’s autonomy; and (c) the fact that the Transitional Council, while an obvious reactionary entity in formation, already announcing it will honour all international contracts signed by Qaddafi’s regime, is not yet fully reducible to a reactionary formation only, insofar as its own survival is also predicated upon overwhelming Qaddafi. Thus, the pro-revolutionary Left puts Qaddafi first, not because it has determined him to be the greater evil but because it is tempting to forget with the entrance of the West that he is not a lesser one.

Behind all this, the pro-revolutionary Left stands on a fundamental principle that it shares with the anti-imperialists. That is, it concurs with this adage from Guy Rundle’s arguments for intervention: “[I]f there wasn’t…risk, there wouldn’t be a revolutionary moment at all”. This is its third and most complex justification – and one that separatist pro-revolutionary advocates on the Left need to pay closest attention to. For despite the fact I am speaking of revolutionary risk as an argument for intervention, I will go on momentarily to suggest how it might be that this same tenet also informs the anti-imperialist Left’s different conceptualization of the stakes in this situation and with equal validity. Before I can do this, though, I need to focus more closely on the specifics of the pro-revolutionary interpretation of how the revolutionary imperative relates to risk and why risk, as the pro-revolutionary Left conceives it, should not be taken as a blank cheque for adventurism. In pointing in his article to the indispensability of risk to the revolutionary moment, Rundle appears to be informed – whether consciously or osmotically, I don’t know – by a fuzzy Badiouian ethics based on Badiou’s contention that the chance for a revolutionary breakthrough cannot be beholden, as liberals would insist, to the prospect within it for its lapse into down the line into an “obscure disaster”. I’m fundamentally behind this claim but I nonetheless feel we need to clarify just what it is that we mean when we say this. Because an imperial takeover of events – or the intervention causing chaos – is not at all what Badiou would mean by an obscure disaster. Indeed, a great deal of intellectual imprecision and Left-wing Chinese whispers has gathered around this delicate concept – to the point that it has accrued a folk intellectual understanding pretty much interchangeable with the careless boosterism patent in another of Rundle’s pro-intervention sentiments: “[I]f you believe a radical opportunity trumps a received theory, you accept the risk of terrible screw-ups.” Looking at this restatement of the risk thesis above, one might, indeed, be forgiven for wondering just what distance there is, exactly, between the content of Rundle’s own summons for us to recognise that “a moment has presented itself which has the possibility to body forth a vast amount of radical change”, Badiou’s encouragement for us to accept that an Event entails the risk of obscure disaster, and the liberal interventionist bet that (to cite Paul Berman’s tellingly self-focused words) “freedom for others means safety for ourselves”? Do liberals not see a “radical opportunity” in Libya too that trumps the “received theory” of Iraq and the Bush years? Are they not perennially ready to risk “terrible screw-ups”, at the expense of those they seek to save? Are they not audacious? Does all of this mean that liberals can also lay claim to the argument that an obscure disaster is not an obstacle to their ambitions but a miscarriage of their first-class intentions? How can we distinguish the three?

To begin with, let’s take Paul Berman’s encapsulation of the zero-sum logic of freedom and safety. Though it responds to a Right-wing policy-tank realist mentality that insists safety and freedom are perennial antagonists, Berman’s maxim highlights the role not only of complacency but bald-faced bad faith in the liberal interventionist gamble. After all, what if it were the case that freedom for others did not mean safety for ourselves? What if, rather, it presented a tangible “danger”? Which not to say a danger in terms of violence to our lives and our equal livelihoods – no, that’s the situation we are already in, not least – by way of a litotes – because of liberal-capitalist democracy’s helping hand. No, the danger we raise here is the danger of the structural demolition of what Anwar Abdel Malek has brilliantly called “the hegemonism of possessing minorities” – the structuration of the world upon which the West and all the other capitalist elites sit perched. Think here of this headline from TIME magazine: “Europe Hails the Arab Protests, but Fears a Flood of Migrants.” Isn’t the fact one of Europe’s immediate reactions to the Libyan uprising was to reinforce its borders against it not the sign in itself that we refuse freedom when it presents a political danger to the political interests that define our “safety”? And, indeed, has this not helped to reduce the free movement of the revolution, not least in terms of a reassurance for the Libyans that should they bet everything on unseating Qaddafi and fail that there will be a safe and free space somewhere in the world for them and their loved ones elsewhere? In this respect, though he could never in a million years compute it so ideal a flunky of liberal imperialism is he, what Berman – who has been as loud a mouth as any on the dangers of Arab difference – means by freedom and safety is something more like subsistence for others and securitization for ourselves. This goes directly to the biopolitics of liberal imperialism in which any uprising against structural subordination in our world system is cynically and programmtically conflated with true terroristic violence (and, thus, through this, liberal imperialism itself becomes an inherently necropolitical project as the widening delegation of the dieable turns itself over into outright domination or outright catastrophe). In referring to risk, then, the pro-revolutionary Left is referring to the threat to the successful emergence of this danger, to the way that the revolutionary moment always involves the political danger of being subsumed back into the architecture of a system that looks to broker inequality through its promise of a fair “deal” between safety and freedom in the form of liberal democracy. Thus, the chasm between liberal intervention and Left revolutionary risk is that left-revolutionary risk is a true punt on the unlikely while liberal intervention is a high-risk stratagem that its advocates ideologize into the belief that it is a contingent gamble – therefore, engaging in the very “chanciness” their subtending of chance utterly depends upon.

If Left revolutionary risk makes an impracticable gamble then – rather than plays the odds, or throws the dice – if there is a core excessiveness to it, a sort of drunkenness even, it might also seem that it connects with liberal intervention in yet another way: the argument that sheer will is the key ingredient in the success of an intervention. Read any liberal interventionist diatribe and you’ll quickly detect the key role played by the thematic of will. Time and again, liberal apologists hold that it is a weakness of will that results in liberal-democracy’s failure either to intervene in a situation that demands intervention, or to stay the course and not settle for tyranny when the intervention gets rough. This weakness of will is usually attributed to the influence of both the Left and to the Right – the Right for selling out the sterling values that drove the ideal of the intervention with their anti-intellectualism, insincerity, deceitfulness, despotism and realpolitik, and the Left for sabotaging it likewise with their irresponsibility, illiberalism, intellectual terrorism, groupthink, contemptuousness and all-round crackpottedness. Against these two corrosions, the liberal will must push forward on the true and thankless course of supervising the realisation everywhere of the universal human desire for a political arrangement much like ours. Such a pseudo-Nietzschean emphasis on will is not limited to the latest liberal intellectual cowboy complex gutter-tract but carries all the way up into the thick reasonings and detailings of the highest policy advice. A failure of will, for instance, is the thesis that lies at the crux of the most impassioned and formidably researched liberal interventionist text of the past decade, Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell. Oddly, for all its painstaking collocation of facts, figures and particulars, the primary conclusion of this tome is pure psychologism: that the failure of the United States to prevent genocide can be traced backward not to “a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will”. Here, in the argument that it is a prohibition upon conviction that leads the United States and the world system of power to turn away from genocidal acts or other mass butcheries, will comes into contact with humanitarianism to ostensibly account for why it is we do not seem to experience the same intensity of humanitarian involuntarism equally in the face of all atrocities. It conceals, in short, via the foregrounding of will, the constitutive partiality of humanitarianism when it comes to arbitrating what horror demands action and what tragedy can be mourned but sustained. So it is then that liberal interventionism believes that the problem of failed or overlooked interventions can be traced back to the distortion of a determined democratic intention that is itself innocent. Now, if there is anything that sets the Left attitude to the revolutionary chance apart from the liberal-democrat’s belief in involvement as a radical liberal responsibility, it is the Leftist imposition upon any notion of willpower of the concept of virtue. The bet of the bet for the Left – its real risk – is not that the revolutionaries may fail to be responsible to the revolution but that they must hazard the revolutionary moment becoming ripped down by the chances it will require its participants to take in its name. These dangerous chances might involve self-defensive violence to protect the revolution from its enemies, or tactical exchanges with one enemy power in order to outmanoeuvre another, or, as Žižek has explained, once in government, altering the class bias built into liberal-democracy’s supposedly contentless and merely procedural framework via moving to “change the rules”, “to transform not only electoral and other state mechanisms but also the entire logic of the political space”. In this process of rule reconstitution, there exists a grave risk of concentration, attenuation and outright usurpation of power. But the absolute seperation from liberalism lies in our rejection of responsibility for the sake of solidarity with the revolution by taking such “non-democratic” (which is to say, radically experimental) chances as well as our radical willingness to be held answerable to our fellow revolutionaries in the name of the revolution itself – to be held constantly to book for “errors”, the potential for self-destruction outward into mere dictatorship or backward into some new form of capitalist plutocracy, or both. In essence, there is not only a reconceptualization of politics but a recasting of private agendas into an obligatory relation to being held to account before the tribunal of the equality of the public event. It is here we can recall that Badiou’s notion of the obscure disaster hinges not upon predictable deformations of the revolutionary process, such as reactionary forces seeking to crush it, or even the kind of governmental brutalities Lenin relied upon, but comes about through a total enforcement of the Event, a turning-in of the revolution, a necropolitics that thinks itself a biopolitics of revolutionary preservation but which is, instead, a kind of catacombing of it: think here, for example, of the Purges, or the Khmer Rouge. The obscure disaster results precisely from a dialectic between the irresponsible and the hyper-responsible being frozen: when the dynamic of responsibility – too little, too much – puts in jeopardy an organizational structure that has come to associate itself instrumentally with the Event itself, as it should if it is to remain revolutionary, the threat to order risks a restoration within the Revolution so as to “centralize” (or Centre) the gains and to preserve the revolution against its enemies – which are now the revolutionaries themselves. In that sense, Rundle’s unflustered reference to “terrible screw-ups” is, indeed, more liberal-democratic than revolutionary, insofar as it is turning non-obscure disasters into obscure disasters. The “terrible screw-ups” of intervention are not unforeseeable and thus we are not absolved – if we want to retain fidelity to the revolution – from factoring their known reality in, or of succumbing to the temptation – out of urgency – of wiping our memories clean or predicating our risk on the notion that the imperial machinery can in itself be given the benefit of the doubt. However, this does not discount intervention in itself for the terrible screw-ups are necessary to the revolutionary moment even as they are decisions for which we are responsible. The risk of the revolutionary chance lies in the way that the revolutionary chance places the integrity of the Idea at a risk we are responsive to and responsible for – not the undecidable risk to integrity of the Idea becoming co-opted to enforce a tyranny of its sheer, absolute imposition. To get to the obscure disaster, it already has to be realised. For this very reason, in maintaining a virtuous and radical negativity toward the revolution itself in the name of the revolution itself, as well as exhibiting a besotted enthusiasm, whether tipping toward self-discipline (terror) or intemperance (insurrection), the proper demeanour of the revolutionary is not willpower but solidarity, neither a type of adventurism nor a kind of groupthink but a collective experimentalism and a collective restraint, moving in and out of the ascendant not sequentially but synchronously.

In a moment of brilliant exposition, Žižek explains how this revolutionary solidarity operated in the Russian Revolution and how it differed from the Stalinist reaction:

“…[I]n terms of the revolutionary process, what if the difference that seperates Lenin’s era from Stalinism is, again, the difference between life and death? There is an apparently marginal feature which makes this point clearly: the basic attitude of a Stalinist Communist is that of following the correct Party line against the ‘Rightist’ or ‘Leftist’ deviation – in short, steering a safe middle course; for authentic Leninism, in clear contrast, there is ultimately only one deviation, the Centrist one – that of ‘playing it safe’, of opportunistically avoiding the risk of clearly and excessively ‘taking sides’. There was no ‘deeper historical necessity’ in the sudden shift of Soviet policy from ‘War Communism’ to the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921, for example – it was just a desperate strategic zigzag between the Leftist and the Rightists line, or – as Lenin himself put it in 1922 – the Bolsheviks made ‘all the possible mistakes’. This excessive ‘taking sides’, this permanent zigzagging imbalance, is ultimately (revolutionary political) life itself – for a Leninist, the ultimate name of the counterrevolutionary Right is the ‘Centre’ itself, the fear of introducing a radical imbalance into the social edifice.”

Among the world Left now, and in the revolution itself, the ‘Rightist’ deviation can be understood as the support of intervention and the ‘Leftist’ deviation the strict adherence to anti-imperialism. If the Stalinist credo holds that both options here are worse, the proper solution for us is, rather obviously, not a Stalinist one – the suppression of opposites into the Party line of the centre. Rather, it is precisely the veering zigzag, welded together by our common solidarity with one another, so as to cover both bases and make – not wriggle out of responsibility for – all mistakes. It is here that we may turn back to the absolutely indispensable work of the anti-imperialist Left for they, too, are risking something for this revolutionary moment. If the pro-revolutionary Left risks the intervention confiscating control of the revolution or catalysing the situation into a spiral of anarchic disaster or selling it out by orchestrating a deal with an Qaddafi who somehow manages to cling on to power still, the anti-imperialist Left risks the collapse of the revolution and the murder of thousands in Benghazi through refusing intervention outright. It chooses this not out of an essential heartlessness or doctrinaire blindness – it would, absolutely, be disgusted by the spectacle of Qaddafi in Benghazi slaying the people. It elects this course, rather, out of a burning consciousness of the coming counterrevolution that has, in the moment of aid, already begun to arrive and which wreaks not just any old havoc but a most pernicious mayhem – to be discussed in more depth later – called catastrophization. In short, for the anti-imperialist Left, what is not able to be put from their minds is the fact that the humanitarian face of Western empire and its executioner’s face are not even a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but are one and the same visage. And, if you think this is hyperbole, consider the situation in Libya right now from the perspective of a family member of one of Qaddafi’s soldiers killed by our bombs. Assume for a moment that this family member is not him- or herself involved in the regime in some key way if their involvement would make the idea of their anguish in the wake of their relatives death somewhat more defensible for you. Or perhaps consider that this surviving family member is very deeply involved in the regime but in the way, say, the personnel in the Pentagon were involved in Washington’s war complex when they died on 9/11. For all that your loved one may be on the wrong side of this conflict, were you to curse the Western powers for their intervention, would this be a misplaced sentiment? More importantly, whatever we may think of the rights or wrongs of this, will not such trauma be pertinent in some way in the formation of a post-war Libya? Will there be a sheer clearing away of the remnants of the regime both in terms of suddenly deposed apparatchiks harbouring black reaction or those whose lives have been rent apart by the loss of their loved ones loyal to Qaddafi – in short, the enemy we are bombing? It is not that we need lapse into some extreme pacifism that would upend any ethics of fighting back against Qaddafi’s armies and henchmen. The point, nonetheless, is that the whole matter of the killing takes on a different dimension of truth when it is not the revolutionaries themselves who are doing it. It becomes, in a key aspect, far more disavowable and far more oriented toward traumatic legacies exploitable by the Right. For it has long been the case that the discourse of radical anti-imperialism in the Middle East not only informs the Left but provides the grist for a political fundamentalism or authoritarianism that deftly operates in the contradictions and outright double standards of Western hegemony. That is why the international socialist alliance has struggled for a long time to show its solidarity with the Middle East on the question of imperialism and it has much to do with its refusal to compromise now simply because the Transitional Council – and, yes, many other rebels besides – have called for Western help. The fact that the Libyan revolution, in particular, has risen up against the dynamic of the appropriation of anti-imperialism to justify political tyranny rests heavy on the anti-imperialist mind, and is exactly why the reinsertion of the West back into the equation in any way is such a serious thing. Whatever the necessities that hinge upon it, whatever the plurality of opinion amongst the revolutionaries themselves, it is this historically driven understanding of long self-expressed Arab hopes that informs their thinking on intervention and their heightened appreciation for how such intervention inherently contains the capacity within it to set the whole horrible cycle of authoritarian anti-imperialism back into spin.

On this count, the Leftist case (distinct, again, from the liberal case) that an earlier NFZ might well have been the thing that tipped the revolution over the edge into victory is not correct to hold that it was a failure of solidarity on the part of the anti-imperialist Left to resist this. They, too, were responding to the revolutionary imperative of this uprising. And, whilst we will never know if an early NFZ could have pushed the revolution onwards to success, what does seem clear is that the pro-revolutionary Left helped their own case not a whit by accusing the anti-imperialist Left of being closet Western supremacists. From the first, the pro-revolutionary Left should have appreciated that to play off the risks of our intervention as obscure screw-ups both conflated the obscure with the foreseeable and did not reflect sufficiently on how our assistance, even though requested from within the revolution, remains mediated by the market-state, so mediated, in fact, that our “democratic” willing for an intervention has already begun to make us feel like our state action is synonymous with the revolutionary process itself – which is to say, an appropriation of it already. Unsurprisingly, then, the pro-revolutionary fervour – and, in fairness, the anti-imperialist willingness to brand us on the pro-revolutionary side as sell-outs – resulted in a split of solidarity within the English-speaking Left. Perhaps we might learn a lesson from this, especially seeing as events will not be getting any less thorny from here on in. Leftist support for a NFZ would have been far less estranging and far less disheartening had it insisted that assuming the risks of the revolutionary moment – turning to the hypocritical West for help – need not be seen as the same thing as willingly selling the revolution out to the West, or betraying the cause, even from the perspective of Left anti-imperialism. Had it ventured that the notion that a tactical necessity is automatically an integral failure of values is exactly what the cynical anti-colonialism of tyrants like Qaddafi depend upon to push home their authoritarian claims. Had it held that intervention was a decision that anti-imperialists did not have to support – and in fact, we needed them not to support – but which required their support for us as their continuing comrades, as Leftists, in terms of defending the authenticity of our decision to those – inside and outside the revolutionary Left, inside and outside of Libya – who might disagree with the conclusions we reached. Yet the pro-revolutionary Left could not do this because it was too busy divisively arguing that to not turn to the West at this point was an indisputable betrayal of solidarity. It thus forfeited the chance to push home the crucial point to its comrades: that a tactical turn to the West does not undo the revolution’s aims in and of itself, even as it does involve a setback for revolutionary sovereignty – particularly in the case of an early NFZ that would have given the revolution a tiny – but all the more paternalistic for being so tiny – push over the edge. In castigating Leftist anti-imperialism for blunting the clarity of a unified message at the crucial moment with internal debates, the pro-revolutionary Left failed to take into account that it played no small part in bringing about this squabbling – with its stunning foolishness in ‘calling out’ the anti-imperialists as hypocrites for still speaking of solidarity even though they opposed intervention. One of the things that makes this new wave of political emancipation in the Middle East so unique is this question of its autonomy. As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out, political Islamism emerged as a response to Kemalist-inspired secular rule, which, in content, all too frequently meant dictatorship, the abrogation of civil liberties, the absence of good government, subservience to Western hegemony and the violation of human rights. This current revolution has emerged, in turn, as a response to the failures of both the secular state and conservative political Islam – which took its own turn toward religious repression, political disenfranchisement and classist authoritarianism – yet the ongoing relevance of autonomy indicates that there is a unique thread carried on from political Islamism in this uprising. This thread has been the very thing – in its endless carry-on about the role of cyber-organizing and “secularism” – that the West has been trying to repress – for what it represents is the very refusal of Western-styled or -led democracy. The secular aspect of the Arab revolutions is a misattribution insofar as it is not so much to be thought that they are unconnected to Islam – or have put Islam to one side – but that they are about the creation of a collective so broad and comprehensive it protects Islam itself from the deprivations inflicted upon it by the distortions of authoritarian anti-imperialism, whether secular or religious, in the postcolonial political settlement. It would be more accurate to say in this case that the revolutions are profane rather than secular – profane in their push back against secular and religious authorities both, and profane in their very demonstration that Islamists and the non-Islamic, whether Arab or otherwise, are radically compatible in their desire both for egalitarian self-determination and independence from Western hegemony. On that account, as Buck-Morss writes,

“What is involved here is not freedom but dignity. And in a postcolonial context, dignity matters. Better put, dignity is freedom in a different sense, as liberation from Western hegemony. This is where the ‘colonial difference’ matters: if the adoption of Western-defined freedom brings with it submission to Western power, the purported goal is undermined by the self-alienating means.”

For this very reason, early intervention – though requested by the Libyan authorities – was, indeed, inherently contentious and not just the conceit of some smug Western anti-imperial we-know-best-ism. It should have been our immediate goal on the pro-revolutionary Left not to sharpen that contention but to grasp that it arose from genuine communication of the priority of both concerns among the Leftist Libyan revolutionaries themselves. More importantly, our job should have been to make sure that the involvement of our states did not suddenly invoke a sense in our leaders that they were on the revolution’s side in regards to this fundamental question of dignity. And to respond in turn to the Libyans that we will not forget that the involvement of our intervention does, indeed, entail a limitation upon the revolution’s dignity. Not in the sense of tarnishing its glory but in reopening the old opportunity for our paternalistic interference, our haughty placement of ourselves at the head of history and our manipulation of outcomes through the moral blackmail attendant upon our assistance, since the West, it must be said, does nothing for free. But pro-revolutionary Leftists, within Libya and without, in following their own intuition that the intervention was a risk worth taking, see the revolution that allows for dignity, not just in the Middle East but for anti-Western Leftists everywhere, as the long one, the hard one, the world-historical one, not merely abridged in its fundamental dimension by having to rely on the sheer unjust reality of the asymmetry of world power. That it is only abridged, in truth, by coming once more to see this asymmetry as acceptable. For, to recall a famous passage from Frederic Jameson,

“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets its inexorable limits to individual and collective praxis, which its ruses turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this history can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.”

Jameson’s rendition of history is not merely to see it as a state of injury but to conceive of it as the state of injury that limits intervention upon it as the state of injury. It is what refuses desire and sets limit to praxis. To quote Lenin once more: the Bolsheviks made “all the possible mistakes”. His view does not go then to the point where liberalism and conservatism meet – in their insistence that history itself is corrupt and freedom incremental, a matter of deals (or decrees), services (or servitudes) and, above all, ineradicable – or only partly eradicable – disparities – a position that the Left insists is both mistaken entirely (there is nothing that can be held more above suspicion than history) and does not nearly go far enough (history is not merely corrupt but so monstrous and broken apart by reality that deals, disparities and servitudes can beg and plead and still cannot contain it). For Jameson, rather, history is not just the traumatic kernel of the real but what takes place when individual and collective praxis encounters the refusal of old historical injuries to give way before our practices without more injury – whether minor to fatal. It is, incidentally, from this that obscure disasters take seed and move through the stages of their own deeply contingent yet intricately structured history. For this reason, although history refuses desire, the correct response is not to enforce the Event nor to break with it in the face of history’s harms but to hold the line in multiple directions and revolutionize desire – which is not to say adapt desire to circumstances but uphold the labour that makes it one of the alienating necessities of history that will not forget us, however much we prefer to overlook them. History is the very proof that true political transformations can never be reached by utter simulation of the conditions of freedom – which is, of course, what both really-existing-socialism and liberal-capitalism and fascism all struggle tirelessly to provide. This is what it means for us to speak of being ‘on history’s side’, even if history is not on ours.

Part of the problem for the pro-revolutionary Left has been its explicit refusal to really consider our liberal-capital reality with the same sense of quotidian violation that one immediately summons to mind when considering the history of state socialism or even, most especially, Stalinism. It is part of my ongoing project on this blog to argue for the fact that Stalinism was not the Left opposite of Nazism – a twin totalitarianism, or red fascism – but that it was, in fact, something of a window opening on our own future, which already falls under the shadow of what Sheldon Wolin has usefully called Democracy Incorporated, or “the spectre of inverted totalitarianism”. The idea of inversion is especially helpful, as it suggests that we might think the affects and privations of Stalinism or socialist greyness in the entirely different political topography of monetarized freedoms and hierarchies that contour and striate the anarchy of desires in the market-state and so often make us feel as though we are actually on the right side of history, after all. Why I take this detour is to bring us back round to the point that the condescension levelled upon the anti-imperialist Left for the contradictions that arise of expressing solidarity with the revolution while siding with anti-imperialism has sort to snuff out the fact that this selfsame principle also applies to the pro-revolutionary Left and its sudden disregard of the imperial-capitalist question. That the question of capital has been utterly missing in action from much of the opinion being aired in favour of intervention. My particular interest in this strange omission, then, goes to what degree each side of the Left sees space for a virtuous action from our market-state militarism and what the limits would be on this from the perspective of treating ours as something like a Stalinist system. Could we trust the Soviet Union to intervene upon a domestic revolution in favour of the revolutionaries? If not, can today’s revolutions trust the West? From this angle, it becomes, perhaps, a little more understandable just why it is that there has been a general division on the far Left as to whether this intervention is the right thing to do, no matter how neat or necessary it may seem. On some level, I suspect that this goes to a question of our doctrines. If we subscribe to some variant of communism or international revolutionary socialism, it is more likely that we will take the anti-imperial argument as credible and urgent, even if it seems to condense the system of power to a kind of figure with an agenda (much as, in Stalinist Russia, the most open-eyed, though not necessarily nuanced dissident would be the one who simply referred to the complicated groaning state apparatus of apparatchiks and secret police simply as Stalin). On the other hand, if we subscribe to anarchism, a DeleuzoGuattarian or Foucauldian or deconstructionist infinite democracy paradigm, or other strands of radical or deep democratic leftism, it is more than likely again that we will see the intervention as being riven by power-fields and microcontingencies and partial autonomies and thus having a good solid chance of going right. I actually wonder whether I’m not one of the few hardcore communists to support the intervention – though it is also quite possible that others who operate out of the theoretical resurgence of the communist hypothesis – that is, who have returned to communism via Badiou or Žižek – may well have sided with intervention too – though not because either Badiouian ethics or Žižekian universalism necessarily endorses the pro-revolutionary case as superior. Whatever the case, the very presence of most public intellectuals as well as many academic theoreticians on the pro-revolutionary side of the argument suggests, I think, just how crucial the “doctrinaire” Left is. Much like the émigrés from the Eastern Bloc who, it often seemed, were quite happy to have a nuclear conflict before they’d accept the status quo in Eastern Europe, the quotient of the Left Guy Rundle blasts as “an unviable melange of archaic vulgar Marxism, pre-Marxist obsession with motives, and Second International determinism, all with a dash of identity politics and the worst bits of left communism”reminds us in no uncertain terms of the utter unacceptability of the configuration of compulsion and exploitation across an uneven neo-colonial and class divide. It refuses the moral bribery and ethical blackmail that inures us to this world system. Yet, in Rundle’s estimation, the anti-imperialist Left’s greatest crime is intellectual cretinism:

“For the far-left, anti-imperialism trumped solidarity, and the audacity of revolution, and it seems worth examining how the AI left got to the point where they could refuse to acknowledge that that had become a contradiction, could cover it over with absurd assessments of the military and leadership situation of the revolution; apply a 19th century high capitalist class analysis to a 21st century petro-state; celebrate worst-case scenarios and the conservative doctrine of prudence; cleave to a deterministic account that leached out any notion of audacity or making history; fuse the notion of self-made revolution with a rigid adherence to definition by the nation-state (‘it is up to the Libyan people to make their own revolution’); forget a long history of revolutions taking a chance on drawing in larger powers; and take the same magisterial view of the situation as expressed through the UN in focusing on the humanitarian dimension and the body count, independent of any notion of struggle and victory.”

I’ve already made the point that it is simply unacceptable – and wilfully divisive, a classic case of left-wing libertarianism – to accuse the anti-imperialist Left of lacking solidarity, and made the case for why this is so. I’ve also put the point that the kind of solidarity the anti-imperialist Left is expressing is not inferior to the integrity of our decision on the pro-revolutionary left as the contradiction between pro-revolutionary and anti-imperialism tendencies is not only a problem for them but crosses the divide. However, what is most objectionable about Rundle’s remarks here – muck from a mind who wrote the single best essay against conservatism in the pungent lockdown of imagination and belief in the Left that was the Howard years – is his refusal to even look for a modulated theoretical basis in the anti-imperial approach then declare that it isn’t there to be found. Here, the bravado in Rundle’s language demonstrates exactly how the ideological impact of humanitarian involuntarism fogs revolutionary risk: written across his essays is one imprecation: how can you not help? This is exactly why Richard Seymour is right to say that urgency operates as the currency of humanitarian intervention . It is not that urgency is mere ideological invention but that it is a kind of tasering via reality of any ability to countenance the idea of a serious counterthought. Moreover, it works so that another concurrent reality is to be comprehensively unable to treat it as actionable in any particular way in this moment. As Kafka says, “All human errors stem from impatience, a premature breaking off of a methodical approach, an ostensible pinning down of an ostensible object.” In this respect, urgency is absolutely not a radical virtue, as Rundle holds, insofar as it contains within it the assurance not only that it has pinned down its object but that it has the pinning down itself pinned down. If anything, the true radical virtue is not urgency but criticality, in the triple meaning of the word: (1) an imperative response to crisis; (2) an imperative openness to analytical evaluation, up to and including the constantly demeaned negative of the far Left; and, finally, (3) a state in which the properties of a system undergo an abrupt change, as in a critical temperature or a boiling point. Through refusing to treat the anti-imperialist Left with seriousness, or to synthesize their arguments into the strongest case, rather than seize on any confusion or cant they might have displayed as they attempted to think through the logic of their leanings and instincts, the pro-revolutionary Left has succumbed, whether it realises or not, to that most pernicious of liberal-interventionist concepts, the most pernicious because so seemingly commonsensical and also so fully difficult to think outside of – cleaving, as it does, to that stubborn sense of goodness we have about ourselves. I am talking here, of course, about the logic of the lesser evil.

If anything has made the adjudication of evils into pseudo-reflexive hierarchies of greater and lesser stringency an almost irresistibly ideologically efficacious practice in our time, it is the principle of the lesser evil. The distinctive evil of the lesser evil – its very motivational salience – lies in the way it blurs rather than clarifies the distinction between ethical action and political violence, between a discrete remit and a roaming warrant. Yet, while no doubt most of us on the Left would agree that the lesser evil is a concept deployed hypocritically, we would likely not disagree with the metaphysics of it themselves: while capitalist realism and liberal interventionism and moral conservatism all use the lesser evil to argue for obedience, they are, in fact, the greater evil. The problem is: we don’t actually believe this – as we are seeing right now, in our switchover to support for this intervention. To put it another way, we actually do buy the argument of the lesser evil as they present it. And it is this that has so especially vexed the anti-imperialist Left. In essence, we have all suddenly agreed with Bruno Latour in his consummately capitalist realist maxim: “It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician”. Quite the reverse! The thing Latour takes for ‘something like courage’ here is simple shamelessness. And what the discompositional refusal of the logic of the lesser evil shows us is nothing less than the fact that it takes something like courage today to admit that we will never do better than the revolutionary. That, in fact, such courage is what keeps any accommodation with necessity itself in solidarity with our most revolutionary principles – rather than permits the lesser in the lesser evil to become, by default, a necessary good. Surely is most insidious about our contemporary liberal militarists is how they mystify the role of good in the argument for the lesser evil. Close attention to any extended liberal case for the lesser evil will show that they do not hold the lesser evil to be a moral good, that they openly argue that its ethical quality does not get a pass simply due to its necessity, even as they continue to insist that such an evil is not quite as absolute as it seems, that it can be calibrated into subordination of the wider good of that which it defends. Rather than becoming coextensive with the greater evil for the duration of its existence, and thus as intolerable as it may be the only means available, the lesser evil is treated as self-restrained in some key dimension, as not being as bad as all that. Here we might look for clarification to Michael Ignatieff’s touchstone statement on the logic of the lesser evil. In a situation where no “angelic option may exist”, Ignatieff writes, “either we fight evil with evil or we succumb”; for this very reason, the lesser evil is a resistance against losing sight either of the enemy or the propensity for evil within ourselves. And yet there is an astonishing absence of consideration here as to whether a separate and just as absolute evil does not reside in the general cancellation of “angelic options” that such pragmatism necessitates – purely on the basis of their lack of availability in a particular moment of duress. In this way, the principle of the lesser of two evils has always contained within it not so much a hypocritical exemption for the lesser evil – the outright conversion of evil into a non-evil – although this is where it almost always winds up: think, if you will, not only of Dick Cheney’s colloquial presentation of waterboarding as “a dunk in the water” but also Nancy Pelosi’s knowledge – and subsequent silence and then subsequent need to deny she had any knowledge – of the fact it was being used. In just this way, the lesser evil postulates a kind of surplus-value of democratic “conscientiousness” it then proceeds to both squander, gut, suppress and abandon. The evil entailed in a necessary action proceeds to use the necessity of itself not simply to moralise the means of violence but also to pluralise the evil (for when an evil is greater, many lines can be crossed without a switch in polarities), to architecture any new evil as merely contingent and unconnected to our true values, and finally to evacuate the perpetration of these evils of all penalties since, of course, the evil was not right but it was justified.

In a meditation on the degree to which the lesser evil thesis can be attuned at all to its own evil, Ignatieff writes:

“Let me admit that the very process of justifying an act as a lesser of two evils is an exercise in moral risk. We can legitimately do so only if we actually know what we are doing and do not try to pretend that the necessary character of an evil act excuses its morally dubious character. Thus killing an innocent person to save the lives of hundreds of others might be a lesser evil, but the act would still be wrong. The law might accept a plea in mitigation but it would not excuse the act’s criminal character. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that an agent of the state may make a defense of necessity if accused of torturing someone: this excuse might mitigate the penalty for violating the law, but it would not excuse the torture itself, which remains criminal.”

There you have it, then: an agent of the state may say they had no choice but to torture yet torture itself remains criminal in Israel! The lesser evil in action! The botched conclusion points back to the flaw in the thesis. Crucial to note here is Ignatieff’s structural slipperiness even within what was intended as a determinate and discrete definition on limits: not only are we told that we must “actually know what we are doing” even as it is acknowledged that “justifying an act as a lesser of two evils is an exercise in moral risk”, we are also directed to the fact that the act of killing an innocent person to save hundreds of lives would “still be wrong” and yet is simultaneously, insofar as it is a lesser evil, “legitimately” justifiable. On what level “legitimacy” cancels out the social sense of wrong or moral risk deletes “actual” knowledge of what we are doing – the very core of evil to be assessed if we are to determine whether the lesser evil is, in fact, lesser – these are not only neither acknowledged or theorized but, moreover, are the very open-secret of the political motivation of violence such a schema trades on. Thus, while Ignatieff can argue at other points in his book that “bad consequences are not always predictable”, that “good intentions cannot exempt us from blame when bad consequences result”, that “necessary coercion remains morally problematic”, that democracy must “enforce [its] rules by dismissing from service any of the carnivores who disgrace the society they are changed to protect” and so on, he also needs to reassure us of the very raison d’être of adopting the lesser evil: namely, to be operationally unfettered by democracy. That even while retaining things like torture as criminal breaches in themselves, the law is able to mitigate (indeed, mitigate down to suspending altogether) punishment when presented with such evils – or, for that matter, not even to suspend punishments, as with Abu Ghraib, but to provisionalize them to the lowest ranks. And why it can do this is precisely because the law continues to operate as if the law did not itself authorize such evils, as the evil act were merely and independently criminal infractions of an evenly enforced code the law stood blindly above. To put it another way, if legalising torture, for instance, so as to freely use it in an emergency situation would be an anti-democratic disaster, an utmost evil, and what’s more the extrapolation of “Guantánamo” to a universal principle, the liberal-democratic method of obtaining an approximation of the same end is to import all extraordinary measures into the space of “Guantánamo”, so that, indeed, as we have learnt from Obama, “the base” (incidentally, the literal meaning of the Arabic word al-Qaeda) is too indispensable even for liberal politics and simply can never be closed, both literally and metaphorically, though we remain committed to its closure. Or, to put it more exactly, it can never be closed without undoing the very economy of the lesser evil argument, in which the lesser evil, so it seems, is always to go ahead and create a bantustan of illegality that theoretically does not touch upon the broader oasis of law that is the democratic polity itself (the point of Guantánamo is so that we don’t have to legalise torture or imprisonment without charge in our own country) and also theoretically does not liaise with the wider desert of enemy lawlessness (the erosion of law from within is not leading to evils coextensive with those of our enemies). Torturers that cross back into civil law may, then, and once again theoretically, become subject to trial and punishment – certainly, this legal guarantee is what several outfits in European countries are trying to mobilise against the Bush torture team – but, as with Israel’s Camp 1391, a black site which was not even known to exist until its accidental discovery in 2003, the true aim is not to let any agent – whether official or quasi-official – cross back as a torturer, to leave their crimes behind in the exceptional space. To be sure, is this not part and parcel of the outrageous blooming of redactions and government classifications of sensitive material? This protection of the space of criminal exception from crossing back into law? And is this not also what informed the brutal openness of the US effort to crush Wikileaks upon its document release and, in turn, the ongoing effort to find a way to use the law to prosecute it? As if the law ought to protect against such violations of the zone of exception.

There is more to this, however. The legitimation of evil methods through the mitigation of illegality’s reach does not simply remain static in the zone of exception, hanging over the head of the homo sacer. It sets in train the very universalization of evil that such segregation is ostensibly designed to avoid. Thus, to take two arbitrary examples on different places and scales that indicate the intensification we have witnessed over the last ten years. First, in 2004, the Australian High Court ruled that it was legal to detain an asylum seeker – or, indeed, any person – indefinitely, without charge, for “protective purposes”, on the basis of an absence of a bill of rights in the constitution. And second, in the Occupied Territories, although it is a practice explicitly rendered illegal in 1999, the shackling of Palestinian prisoners continues openly and ubiquitously in both the Israeli armed forces and the intelligence services. For our interests here, what is important to note is not just the violent reduction of the rights of refugees or those marked off as the enemy – both considered security risks – but the radical extension of the principle of their mistreatment straight through the law. In the first case, the notion that indefinite detention becomes permissible due to an nonexistence of a bill of rights in the Australian constitution opens up a radical adumbration of lawlessness in the law: it would be as if it were yet to be determined if Australia is, in fact, a democracy. And, in the second instance, we encounter a manifest refusal to either abide by or to enforce the lawfulness of the law even when its jurisdiction should apply, as if, finally, we had begun to treat the law for what it was all along: the impassive placeholder of our values. From CIA black sites, to drone strikes on civilian targets in Pakistan, to extraordinary rendition of prisoners to nations less boxed in by certain human rights legalities, to corrupt contracting with dictators for the sake of economy and stability, to the chronic and continual reports of the junking of proper procedure in investigations at every turn, the utilisation of every loophole available without any self-restraint or seeming internalisation of an egalitarian intelligence; from the abandonment of warrants, to the executive pursuit of unlawful surveillance, to the erosion, if not outright abolition, of equal access to rights through restriction of access to evidence, or legal aid, or the rising cost of the law, to the resort to police brutality to break up protests and the ongoing monitoring and intimidation of activists, in all of this, the supersession of emergency over unbendable democratic principle has been so thoroughly permanentized that its level of extent now hinges radically upon court decisions that orient their findings on what is not to be found and the relative degree of whim, ruthlessness and latitude – as well as public relations management – concentrated in the executive authority. It may well be the case that many of us – perhaps most – will not run afoul of this new radical inapplicability of the law and this astonishing executive-police apparatus – as, of course, most citizens of the Soviet Union did not end up in the Gulag – but it is also worth pointing out that this is exactly how violent status quos operate: Jim Crow, obviously, did not deny white Southerners the vote; in fact, it enhanced their sense of enfranchisement. However, it would be foolish to assume – no more than anyone in the Soviet Union, including members of the party, assumed they were safe from the Gulag because they did all the right things – that any person is not eventually expendable when the priorities of reality shift. Because the extraordinary duress of the closed zone of the lesser evil needs, then, to also be a total and transportable principle, deployable anywhere and in the face of any contingency, because it must move where the interests of the system move, it accumulatively, if unevenly, debilitates enforcement of the law and involutes the law’s force. And, moreover, grows ever more able and emboldened to do so – in a process Adi Ophir has evocatively called “catastrophization”.

Catastrophization is not the same thing as catastrophe. As Ophir maintains: “It is a process, not a cataclysmic event that ruptures space and time.” And since the end of the Cold War, accelerating in the years since September 11, to now reach a new plateau in the wake of the financial crisis, we have lived not purely in an age of catastrophe, as it so often feels, but, rather, an age defined above all by this procedure of catastrophization. The thing that sets apart a catastrophe from a process of catastrophization, Ophir explains, is the fact that “a catastrophe is an event in the strong sense of this term”. In a sense, catastrophe happens while catastrophization transpires. The most important point Ophir makes, however, is that catastrophe is not an ideological fetish: it is authentic whenever and wherever it occurs, even as its occurrence is almost certainly imbricated catastrophizing procedures. Designated spatially by “the deterritorialization of a whole region and then by a reterritorialization of a special zone within it, a zone of disaster”, a catastrophe describes “the area in which former orders crumble, normal expectations become meaningless, the self-evident dimension of everyday life is lost, and where, amid ruins of all kinds, the survivors experience a dramatic reduction in their ability to move and to communicate”. Temporally, “the nature of time itself changes”: “durations, sequences, repetitions, the empty moments of waiting, the intervals between one happening and another – all these are transformed during the time of catastrophe and will be recovered only gradually, if at all, when a new normalcy will be established”. Unlike catastrophization, which takes place and expands within time and space, it “transforms both time and space”. By this definition, for instance, the financial crisis, while absolutely unable to be understood outside of catastrophization, explodes as a catastrophe, as a disaster that may take even its architects and its main players by surprise. Similarly, though the idea behind the September 11 attacks – as Fawaz Gerges has so audaciously and convincingly argued – was a consummate act of catastrophization, an immense and highly unilateral gamble by al-Qaeda that drawing the United States into open war in the Middle East would shock the ummah – the world-wide community of Muslims – into joining battle on the side of the exhausted and internally fractured jihadist splinter groups, nevertheless the catastrophe of the event itself did not generate anything like that outcome: in fact, far from “the expected flow of seasoned jihadis and fresh volunteeers to the Afghan theater” in 2001, al-Qaeda “found itself alone facing the brunt of the American armada” – and, if not for the immense catastrophizing force that was to become invasion itself, with its eye already roaming Iraq-ward, the terrorist cell may well have been comprehensively overwhelmed organizationally by the West then and there. Catastrophization, then, does not orchestrate disaster according to a rulebook or a playbook, a single regime or a unitary plan. And yet, part of what seems to define a catastrophizing process is precisely the subsumption of rupture into the processional framework of itself – even as it intensifies and trends toward a rupture that it does quite not predict or even tend toward absolutely, but which is, in a sense, its catastrophic unconscious, a rupture that it treats – in said rupture’s capacity to rupture the catastrophizing process itself – also as catastrophe, as the very thing it is on a mission to resist. In this respect, even the most contingent eruption into disaster must force upon a Left resistance the duty not only to respond to the disaster at hand but to theorize the similarly responsive logics, neurasthenias, synaesthesias and catastrophic deletions of the catastrophization processes themselves.

Importantly, Ophir’s description of catastrophe speaks to a scenario so saturated with microfascisms, debasements, privations, traumas and degradations, the kind that usually conjures up a fuzzy horror by the name of Darfur or Rwanda. However, it applies – in Ophir’s argument – also to Palestine – so that what he means by catastrophe does not deserve to be quarantined under the increasingly racist assumption that massacres are a matter of warring ethnicities. In the Parliament of the EU, the ex-premier Guy Verhofstadt of the Liberals’ Group, disgusted by indecision on the NFZ, declared: “In Libya we can change the course of events. There are thousands of heroes. We know who they are but Gaddafi knows as well. He knows their names and their families. If he takes Benghazi it will be nothing more than a massacre, a new Srebrenica, a new Rwanda, a new Darfur.” Notice here what is missing: the simultaneous “crackdown” in Bahrain is not a candidate for inclusion in such a train of atrocities. More importantly, even the conjuring up of this list – Srebrenica, Rwanda, Darfur, in its very emphasis on ethnic cleansing – refuses the inclusion of the more obviously political violence in Bahrain. Yet, is not Bahrain also split along “ethnic” lines – as a Sunni monarchy calls on the Wahabbi Saud dynasty to put down a mass movement composed of – though not exclusive to – Shi’ites? Likewise, even as Qaddafi has been presented as a political threat to the revolution, does not the sheer density of the bloodshed his victory portends – what makes it so much an atrocity – stem from the fact that Libya is a nation – as we’re told in undertows – of tribes? Isn’t there even some indication that his ongoing support – rather than composed of political followers – could lapse into the violent ethnos? Think, here, for example, of the humanitarian dread that proceeded this one over a possible slaughter of Africans due to the role of the mercenaries. It is not that these fears are purely misplaced – the tribal dimensions of Libyan society have been politicized in ways that, under a set train of circumstances, could trigger some atrocity – but that there is a presumption of a lack of political proprioception in the Libyans – as if it would be highly consistent for them to lapse into an indiscriminate massacre of black Africans, for example, rather than such events requiring a complex prolonged process, as in Rwanda or Darfur, of victims becoming killers – a process, in short, more likely to the West’s involvement than to take place in lieu of it. And it is this that seems to mark off the “unlimitedness” of Qaddafi’s massacre from the disgraceful but apparently impossible to alter army action in Bahrain. In short, beneath humanitarian involuntarism lurks a racist implication that insupportable violence only occur in zones outside the geopolitical settlement – that a “tribal” massacre always qualifies, while a methodic “political” military repression does not – as if people were not being executed in Bahrain, and brutally too.

To be clear: I certainly do not mean to suggest that it is subtextually racist to support the Libyan intervention on the basis of the threat of Qaddafi. That the impending violence levelled at Benghazi, however framed, was real is what undergirds the pro-revolutionary belief that our intervention deserved support. Too, the fact that the contradictory power structure of our world will not enable us to respond to Bahrain with equal intensity does not, thereby, mean we must be consistent in the face of that structure’s contradiction – as the anti-imperialist argument about the fact that the US Fifth Fleet is anchored in Bahrain and standing idly by would seem to entail. For that contradiction belongs to imperial power structure and is not one upon which we have ever been given a referendum on whether to endorse. But this is not permission to simply dispense with Bahrain as the real core of the problem of the self-motivated architecture of our power. For what does the counterpoint of Bahrain represent if not the very symptom of how alive and kicking our imperialism is, how synchronously it is at work with our “selfless” actions in Libya, how, even as we “come to the aid” of the Libyans, there must seemingly also be this sideshow of a bloody arbitration of imperial and capitalistic interests, a sideshow that always seems to supervene upon any transfigurative extenstion of the axiom of equality to its end? What really defines the Darfurs or Rwandas more than their drastic volume of evils is the fact that they are monstrous events that it has taken immense ideological will on our part not to enter into (or to believe that we have had no part in creating). They are those monstrous events, in other words, we are definitionally incapable of entering into, which it seems we are “objectively” passive before, for the very reason that we are already there in them: the very blockage to our intervention is the presence there of ourselves already, of our deeply twisted interests gone awry in a way too inconvenient and too structurally integral to justly deal with. In this sense, the crackdown in Bahrain should be thought of as today’s Darfur, Srebrenica or Rwanda, for while it does not comport to the specificities of those other conflicts at all, it fits precisely because it does not fit that frame. All of this leads us back to Libya and the issue of catastrophization. Just as catastrophization inheres in our very own civil societies today, in the form of the erosion, sequestration, diffident demolition and perpetual default toward corruption of the democratic and infrastructural processes, so it also reaches out to become an actionable weapon of imperialism, both to contain the burgeoning effects of our own slow violence impinging upon our everyday lives and to respond to impediments and blockages to the liquidation and reformation of markets in the global market – in short, to combat “protectionism” (often via protectionist methods aimed at pauperizing competitive sectors or labour forces) – and propel the multinational corporatism – as opposed to fair trading internationalism – indispensable to the global capital that fuels our home lives. Beyond this double movement, however, what makes catastrophization so tyrannically effective a weapon is that it operates via the very deletion of a capacity to cognitive map it through all its passages and manipulations. Ophir elaborates what a curious, creeping and ‘objective’ form such catastrophization takes:

“[A] catastrophic event may also be described as a culmination of the chronic problems of the ‘normal’ state of affairs spread throughout the entire social space. The chronic problems of postmodern society – transport, pollution, particularly violent neighborhoods – are similar in character. They are handled simultaneously by experts from different systems, with uncoordinated tools and without the capacity of any one system to offer a synthetic point of view for addressing the problem. The same is true of distinctly civic issues such as preserving green lungs in densely populated areas (a matter handled by experts in the fields of urban planning, transportation, real estate, recreation, and so on, representing science and technology, the market, local and central government)…Attempts by the various authorities to alleviate the distress, to treat the ‘ailment’, seem more and more like pissing into the wind. No one really knows the ’cause of the ailment’; getting to the ‘root of the problem’ is an election slogan; and holistic social medicine is a utopian vision that can no longer be entertained. And all this is not because of the false consciousness or blindness of a particular class or group to the suffering of another, but because in the postmodern social space the problem or the ailment usually has no ‘roots’. ‘Postmodern’ evils spread through the social space like the ‘rhizome’ described by Deleuze and Guattari. They are an immanent part of the operation of the combined systems, not a sad deviation or a localized malfunction causing disaster. ‘Systemic malfunction’ is the permanent state of the intricate web of social systems and a condition for their correct operation. Such, for instance, are traffic incidents, seemingly ‘built in’ to the structure of modern life, a phenomenon we are doomed to accept along with cars and freeways in a package deal, or ‘the drug problem’, or ‘white-collar crime’, and the varied spectrum of ‘corruption scandals’. Perhaps similar terms can also be aptly applied to diseases such as cancer and AIDS, not to speak of enclosed institutions such as prisons, hospitals, and other kinds of institutionalized ‘shelters’, and all the more so of an enclosed territory under occupation.”

Catastrophization, in this formulation, is not to be reduced to the principle and protocols of rationalized dysfunction – or even, as per Paul Virilio’s catholic ventings about technological accelerationism and its information bomb, an updated version of the integral accident. Rather, the uniqueness of catastrophization lies in the very irrationality within our cognition of the principle of rationalized dysfunction: the way that its very structuration with leaking evils is made, violently, to be seen as the best of all possible worlds, something we need to acclerate the process to defend and protect. Thus, to revisit Latour: “It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician”. In this respect, we can understand catastrophization not as the planned engineering of catastrophes but rather their sinister ecological management around an obscure core of constant deterioration, a market-state managerialism of relations and interactions between organisms and their environment, including other organisms, objects and knowledges, that is also a type of half-planned, half-erratic defoliation. In this way, catastrophization both steers away and toward catastrophe in a bipolar motion that makes it genuinely – but not authentically – unpredictable.

If Ophir’s analysis seems to be making explicit reference to the decaying polities of the First World in describing catastrophization, his gesture outward to occupation at the end, as well as his other work on humanitarian emergency, points to the fact that these very dilemmas will just as soon pertain the liberal-democracies we seek to groom elsewhere. Far from a mere symptom of Western neoliberalism, catastrophization pertains to the political economy of late capitalism itself. Nonetheless, the colonial difference enters in to orchestrate a vastly different quality and capacity to such creeping catastrophes in the postcolonial world – that taints the very lack of purpose in any unintended consequences of our interventions with a directedness all the same. One might even call this imperialism’s purposiveness without purposefulness. Exactly because of this, like an irrepressible rash, the intervention in Libya brings with it the immediate corollary of control – the Transitional Council has already announced, perhaps even without too much coercive pressure, perhaps out of sheer gratitude, with its own eyes on the need for brisk trade in the postwar future, to honour all of Qaddafi’s international contracts; likewise, France has brashly snatched the symbolic helm by predicting – not just calling for – the immanent and obligatory demise of Saleh in Yemen. And here, one can’t help but think that it is not because Sarkozy has suddenly discovered he possesses a working conscience but because he feels authorized now to subsume the revolutions under Western leadership, with belligerence and revolution – in his very rhetoric – becoming sudden allies. It is this frontline, finally, and despite the tendency to grimly and rather too deterministically focus on worst-case scenarios that could well not come to be, that is fielded by our comrades on the anti-imperialist Left. The anti-imperialist Left is not simply passive but is active in a different way – not despite but because it appears abrogating its “responsibility” to the revolutionaries. Because for all the pro-revolutionary Left’s real sense of involvement, is it not the case that our support, in terms of our praxis, amounts to letting our state do the work and criticising its excesses? Is there not, in some way, a limitation on our doing more once we have supported the intervention? A basic ideological impact of military help is the subsequent retraction of a civil society response. Yet, among things that we – meaning Leftists – should be doing right now- is using the moral leverage of this moment as a clear call to “stop selling arms to dictators” (and isn’t this interventionism, in some key way, a massive exercise in eradicating those tear gas cans in Egypt?) – indeed, to introduce system of oversight in our own countries to emphatically disbar such military compacts; to agitate for asylum for people fleeing from Libya so as to discourage the partitional urge to solidify gains and create a safe zone by offering our own lands as a refuge of last resort; to push for the granting of substantial aid to charities taking medical supplies and food supplies to Libya (so far, there is little sign of any concerted effort to relieve the suffering of the refugees on the borders or provide aide to Tunisia to help it deal with the situation); and to fight to make sure oil companies like BP re-negotiate contracts that benefit fairly the people in the future free Libyan society rather than the multinational bosses and bankers. What is remarkable, for instance, in Rundle’s sustained attack on the anti-imperialist Left is the utter nonexistence of the urgency of any of this. And it is the very fact we wouldn’t think to think of it in this moment – that it isn’t at the very front of our minds – that points to the unimpeachable commitment and solidarity of the anti-imperialists.

The pro-revolutionary and anti-imperialist Left have moved apart not because either one of them has betrayed the cause but because loyalty to the cause requires taking both sides. In saying this, I do not want to be thought as synthesizing or bridging the contradiction: rather, it is only a wider horizon of appreciation of the paradoxical dynamics of revolution that we must verge toward from each of our respective partialized and compromised – though not compromising – positions. If history is what hurts, then we would be best served by keeping close to hand another aphorism of Kafka’s: “You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world – that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature – but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.” This is the very grounds of Leftist solidarity and what holds us across the antagonism together as more than two competing constituencies or a set of private interests. It is this refusal to withdraw into ourselves that can keep us, incredibly enough, on both sides without finding the middle ground that betrays both sides. In this, we fill find a new synthesis take hold – perhaps even sooner than we think – a sudden coming together and springing into reality of the struggle, seemingly ‘out of nowhere’, as we saw in Egypt. This synthesis, however, does not derive simply from the Hegelian aufheben but arises out of a kind of movement between two methods of judgment that themselves synthesize in their pronged unity: on the one hand, something like a form of Occam’s Razor and, on the other, something like a ‘pataphysical science of imaginary solutions. Perhaps Reza Negarestani has best indicated how such a method – perhaps something like what Frederic Jameson elsewhere calls a “utopian method” – would proceed in relation to philosophy or the arts:

“[The tuning fork of speculation] has two prongs. We see one prong as the prong of reason. The other prong is a razor. The speculative artist or philosopher at the same time has a razor in one of his hands, and reason in the other. These two, reason and the razor, are essentially not interchangeable. The razor, by itself, is a romantic and blind tool. It just cuts for the sake of being extreme. And reason itself does not have the tenacity or audacity to evacuate even the rational ground of itself. So, what it does, what this tuning fork does, it tunes speculation. The razor cuts for the extreme, it sheds possible grounds, future grounds and methodically cuts in different ways – not only restlessly carving out the regional from the universal but also transplanting universal into the regional field. On the other hand, the other prong, the prong of reason, sheds light on the field of the surgery of this razor – it sharpens it. Now, the movement of these two prongs resonate with each other in such a way that they tune the field of speculation.

Perseverance in prying apart the violent economy of one’s flesh – the role of the razor – is to cut just for the sake of being extreme – as gamble, as refusal – and in so doing, to methodically and restlessly excavate the interior, “carving out the regional from the universal but also transplanting universal into the regional field”. It compares to the sheer cleavage of the Left to each position in this moment. But in the other direction, reason – which I draw together here with ‘pataphysics, or what Alfred Jarry called – quite deliberately, I believe – the science of imaginary solutions, a science, he announced, which “symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineament” – this reason “sheds light on the field of the surgery of this razor”, “sharpens it” and – what’s more – drives what Negarestani identifies at another point as “an ethics of humiliation and a science of openness” – a consciousness of finitude that pushes us back on solidarity and an analytics based upon the realisability of the unreal – which is not to say the illusory or merely wished for but the abstract, the hypothetical, the transcendental and the incredible. In this way, the unbound field of speculation is bound by our action and consideration to the horizon of revolution. And the insecurity between razor and reason – one too sharp, the other too blunt – is the true composition of the risk that the revolutionary moment opens up. It underlines the crazy gamble that this time, despite all odds, we might achieve everything. That is to say, not a closing down of history but an exodus and pilgrimage and trek of history into a universally enhanced and unpicturable context, vexed by its own constellation of snags, obstacles, dilemmas, delinquencies, obstructions, trespasses, contradictions and conditions but fundamentally intransitive with and universally better than the power-arrangements of this. What Marx might have called a revolution in the mode of production – an irreversible or incommensurable alteration so that we cannot (and, though we may experience retrospective passion for past historic periods, would not want to) go back. The request from the Libyans for help might mean there was reason to respond positively to that request, especially with Qaddafi poised to massacre the revolutionaries, but it does not thereby go on to indicate that such a complete response to revolution on its own, rather than a defensive response to counterrevolution. Such a reinforcement is as basic as survival but survival is a pro-preservational move before it is a pro-transformational move. If the transformational is to retained, we need to look beyond the quarantine of the preservational in sheer survival. For, quite simply, the reckoning we put off now with our protection stands ready to come back to us later, via that selfsame involvement, in spades. If anything, this is the gut feeling that gnaws at the anti-imperialists. And, whether it turns out to be right or wrong in this case, the well-known propensity toward such catastrophization, which follows our interventions like a bridal train, ought to make any Leftist worth the name pause in their tracks. The position we’re put in affirms my point that we need to do more than follow our own instincts; we need to sincerely follow the thoughtpaths of one another and encourage them all the way. And be willing to vouch for one another’s motives when we come together again, as we will have to, in the realisation that hypocrisy is at this juncture so heavy in the air, cynicism so rife, that only trust in the ethics of our comrades can protect us, even when they hold the other line, against a true betrayal of either our wholehearted commitment to revolution on the one hand (unbending opposition to the fiefdom of any Qaddafi) or our wholehearted commitment to anti-imperialism on the other (unbending opposition to the kingdom of capital and its humanitarian throne in the West).

“The secret of historic change through the utilization of political power resides precisely in the transformation of simple quantitative modifications into a new quality, or to speak more concretely, in the passage of an historic period from one given form of society to another.” — Rosa Luxemburg

“As Obama signed the bill into law, someone in the back of the room yelled: ‘We’re here, Mr. President. Enlist us now!’
‘I couldn’t be prouder,’ Obama said.”

For those of us already enlisted to that other, great, militant – though resolutely anti-militaristic – cause known as the Left, a “civil rights” scene like this one cannot help but seem just a little bit disorientating. From the back of the room, an enthusiastic cry of queer equality binds recognition and subservience together so seamlessly as to collapse all distinction between them, while a proud President of colour, at the front of the room, well pleased with the patriotism of his new brood, beams paternalistically on. To purloin W.E.B. DuBois’s classic phrase, the ‘double consciousness’ of the moment could hardly be more palpable. Even as we know the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to be a clear win against the simmering, encephalitic bigotry of heterosexist hates, it simultaneously seems hardly clear at all just what sort of win this really signifies for the queerness of queer rights. Indeed, if, on the one hand, it appears a milestone achievement for sexual equality, if it is, without question, the legal undoing of a persecutory regime in place since the middle of World War II, we find that it is also hemmed in, at the same time, by what can perhaps be called the politics of permissive conscription: that is, the idea that to be a real citizen is to be as equally entitled or obliged as anyone else to choose to wage war, that to count is to be allowed to serve. The whole episode carries with it the distinct impression of having been signed up – and of having willingly signed up – for inclusion in the worst of what the state has to offer only, of having been enlisted – and having willingly enlisted – in direct service to the US military’s intense contemporary escalation of the world’s radical rupturisation and re-rupturisation into orchestrated disorder that goes by the name “globalisation”. In other words, the repeal falls flat along a fault line in which a citizen’s sovereignty – or, to put it another way, their formal recognition as “a full citizen” (though not necessarily their actual realisation of rights or material wealth, thereby) – is declared as being defined by their full availability for contribution to the dictates of what Carlo Galli calls today’s globalized “world of war”.

Because of this, an irritable and restless ambivalence can be felt hanging over the Left in the wake of repeal, a fundamental ambiguity as to the implications of the event coupled together with a fractious, squabbling opinionation over what it simply has to mean, pro or con. Given the frequency with which the Left tends to fall into such joined-at-the-hip fits of cluelessness and pontification, we could even dub this particular syndrome ‘Leftitis’. Yet, while there is, undoubtedly, a grossly conformist belief from the mainstream Left in the secretly radical credentials of any kind of middling progress, as well as a willfully obdurate refusal from the radical Left to accept the intuitions of the mainstream Left as having a valid point on basically any issue; while, together, this dynamic expresses an atavistic need on the Left to differ from, rather than to align with, one’s colleagues, and in so doing, to savage any notion of a comradely basis to any dispute, to point all this out before going on to assert the righteousness of one’s own point of view raises, rather than disperses, the disputatious stakes, in a classic case of what Timothy Morton has called “going-meta”. In that respect, we might do better to avoid pursuing criticism of a lack of solidarity among the Left – as much as it may, as ever, exist – and, rather than demolishing existing arguments for or against repeal only, explore, instead, why repeal might invite antagonism from the perspective of a common Leftist confusion about its implications. For, if we look at this issue more laterally, both the confusion and the rival assuredness over what the end of DADT means can be understood more usefully as the product of a painfully earnest and sincere desire, common to both positions, to be clear-sightedly on the side of queer rights-realization without having first really processed the fact that what is at stake in this affair is precisely the cultural lack of clarity over where the lines of that side exactly lie. In the face of such cultural occlusion of the dimensions of the space of struggle for queer rights, we should not be surprised that the immediate result of the response to repeal, especially in the queer Left community, has been a sort of see-sawing between indecorous overcelebration of the event and myopic denial of every skerrick of its significance.

If we are to begin to parse this complicated situation, therefore, it is crucial we seriously acknowledge that the end of DADT is not just a propaganda event, a manufactured moment for queers, or, if on the level, then simply a crumb tossed off by an administration beginning to look exceedingly short on left-wing credentials. It is not, in short, just another chapter in the contemporary history of queer co-optation to the mores of heteronormative culture. But it is likewise important to scrutinize the inconversant enthusiasm, the pie-eyed gratitude, with which we are expected to greet the repeal – or, for that matter, to interrogate the bare-minimal sense of this event as a civil rights attainment that those among us who have been steadfastly behind repeal but against the military have felt ought to be credited, at the very least, to its lopsided legislation. Indeed, this idea of repeal as self-evidently a civil rights achievement – albeit of an incremental kind – warrants special attention, for the way it seems to so reasonably reconcile both sides of the argument. From this ‘enlightened’ perspective, repeal is obviously nothing worth enthusing over since the real work of queer rights has nothing to do with the military, while those who have argued down queer inclusion in the miltary as the wrong kind of anti-discrimination are dismissed as unreconstructed identity partisans simply shitting on the hard realities of struggle, unwilling to accomodate the different kinds of queer subjectivity we have to stand for, as a matter of Leftist principle, whether we agree with their choices or political orientations or not. But this view not only fudges sexual integration in the military as a queer Leftist issue of enduring relevance, beyond DADT, it also diminishes the sophistication of queer opponents to repeal, who are themselves struggling activists simply being shit upon, even as it flatly dodges the bedevilling fact that a queer anti-militarism is also what we have to stand for as a matter of absolute principle, whether discrepancies of political alignment exist within queer subjectivity or not; that this ideal is not something we can simply suspend from our practice when it becomes too inconvenient or ‘unreasonable’ to maintain: a strong, sobering and uniquely Leftist point to make.

Before we turn to the problems attendant upon even cautious appreciation of the repeal as a civil rights victory, however, let’s begin by countering the argument that the abolition of DADT is little more than a cave-in to heteronormativity and military mass murder. Particularly if one subscribes to the Foucauldian notion of the productiveness of power, one is easily able to perceive a strange contradiction in the formal integration of queers into the military: namely, the fact that, far from simply receiving a straightforward entitlement from the state, queers have also seemingly given away something to authority. Just what they have given away is what we might see as an odd reserve of dissident potential, since up until this point, queers (or U.S. queers at least), as queers, and as queers living at the territorial heart of deterritorialized neoliberal imperialism, have been held away from full, formal mobilisation into global war, even at the ‘democracy’ level of Hardt and Negri’s three rings of Empire. As witnessed by the heterosexist spectacle that led to the initial introduction of DADT as a compromise measure back in 1993, the phobic inability to acknowledge the obvious compatibility of queers with war was, in itself, a prop against queers becoming equal servants of what Jasbir Puar has dubbed ‘homonationalism’ (of which more below). Specifically what this dissident reserve could have achieved beyond that, however, is far more difficult to say, for, even if we take its negative dialectical power at face value, such power seems to find itself inhibited by its very intransitive quality – or, in other words, its inability to travel beyond self-identified queers who are already opposed beforehand to military service. Queer exemption from the military was, in other words, an exception without universality, which is the reason why it has worked so stigmatically against queer rights and why it has been championed so unrelentingly by fundamentalist conservatism. From World War II on, anti-militarism, we might say, became gay, in the strictly perjorative and identitarian sense, just as all anti-militarists became sexually suspect (as evidenced by the civil Right obsession in the 60s and 70s with establishing causative links between the sexual revolution and the anti-war movement, an obsession Nixon in particular would exploit all the way to the presidency).

Still, if exclusion from the military can’t be thought as somehow conferring an inherently dissident status upon queers in itself, this does not address whether or not DADT provided an unintended advantage to queers in terms of their own personal non-assimilative options. In an opinion piece written between the Federal Court finding DADT unconstitutional in September and the Congressional repeal of the law in December, queer activist Troy Williams declared himself in favour of the ban. Though his stance is already outrun by the course of events, his reasoning is by no means outdated and is still worth a close look. “There are many things worse than discrimination,” he tells us provocatively, like the horrors of war, from which, he contends, pragmatically speaking, the rule against same-sexuality provided a dreadfully shaming and despicable but nonetheless available way out for closeted soldiers. Worse than discrimination, too, he goes on, is the fact that the repeal of DADT supplies queers with the treacherous new “freedom” to perpetuate in the open “the same system of violent oppression” that has thrived for so long on an unassailable belief in the eminent dispensability of human rights for its own purposes, not least when it comes to queer lives. Far from maximising justice, then, “our desire for inclusion has made us silent to the fact that the military structure itself is a corrupt and corrupting force”. And as thanks for that desire, he concludes, queers may now expect to be relegated to insignificance in a different way, as yet more unparticularized “fodder for future wars”. Thus, he signs off by calling on us to support DADT as a means to abjure militarism altogether:

“To professional gay lobbyists, stop militarizing our politics. Instead, redirect the untold millions you spend on repealing DADT to college educations for low-income queers. Fund full health care for queer veterans. Encourage lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans to denounce war and proclaim peace. Let’s get back to the work of social justice. Long Live DADT.”

If all of this feels both compelling to you and yet strangely ill-conceived, if it feels iconoclastic even as it seems to spirit a certain rhetoric that the fundamentalist Right itself could conceivably commit to (in the idea that “there are many things worse than discrimination”), this only goes to show how tangled the Leftist impulse on this whole issue really is. Yet, if we were to agree even in part with the argument presented here, and I certainly do, the difficult question we must then ask of ourselves is: does the repeal of DADT truly achieve anything emancipatory? Far from a merely obstructionist query, this challenge has great salience. And an honest Left cannot simply elect to ignore it.

The point has been made in any number of places that the great problem with seeing DADT as an anti-militaristic measure – even inadvertently – is that it ignores the plain fact that queers are already serving, that they simply aren’t being dissuaded from service or spared involvement in the ‘corrupt and corrupting’ military structure by dint of a law that persecutes them for being there. The ban, in short, only compounds a contradiction that will exist with or without it. Representative on this point is a response to the Williams piece found in the comment thread:

“This is another argument that is built on the premise that repeal will ‘let the gays in.’ They are already serving. They already have lost limbs. They have already been killed in combat. They already have PTSD. They already have been gang raped. They are already commiting suicide. Add to the list that because of DADT they also get the lovely prize of being blackmailed by those who would ‘tell.’”

It is precisely on the grounds that queers are there already, suffering all the horrors of war already, being treated as unparticularized war fodder already, that should lead us, thereby, to be staunchily on the side of repeal. And yet this logic still assumes that the only grounds for supporting repeal are pragmatic: we remove discrimination because it compounds the suffering of queer soldiers that already exist and that are already being harmed by militarism, even while they are harming others on its behalf. It is a matter of principle but there is no broader emancipatory logic to the thing. They do not deserve a cruel and unusual consequence for their actions over and above that levelled on any other serving soldier. As historian Claire Potter has written, “I consider this to be an important step — not necessarily towards equality, but towards a basis by which we might imagine an inclusive human rights agenda in the United States and a recognition of the ways in which certain groups are confined by the law and other groups are freed by it. Repealing DADT is an imperfect way of getting there, as is marriage equality, but they are both necessary moves even if you, personally, find marriage and the military noxious and retrograde.” In other words, it’s one of the underwhelming moments that inevitably arise when equalization applies its principles in an inegalitarian world.

As it happens, I generally agree with all this. What troubles me, however, is that I believe there is a key dimension in the repeal of DADT that should be understood as emancipatory but that has not been seen so, exactly because the repeal has been presented as the closing chapter of a long struggle for sexual integration, rather than the point where action around sexual integration can really start to get going. Such early foreclosure, what I will call, after Roland Barthes, “an immobilization and impoverishment of consciousness”, acts in line with Barthes’s own notion of “inoculation.” In his classic book Mythologies, Barthes outlines a series of figures of bourgeois myth, a set of fixed, regulated and insistent rhetorical strategies that recur throughout the dialectal permutations of any given bourgeois grouping as a means of taming resistance. Amongst these, he identifies what he calls “the inoculation”, a gimmick which consists in “admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound insitution the better to conceal its principal evil”. The point of inoculation, he elaborates, is to administer acknowledgment in order to obscure injustice: “One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion”. The end of DADT held up as an end to the struggle of sexual integration in the military, cheered as that which allows us to “move on” to civil rights and other justice issues, marks just such an inoculation. In point of fact, the very least interesting aspect of repeal is the folk-activist, media-stoked wisdom that insists sexual integration in the military is a necessary waystation in the battle to secure a battery of civil rights – partnership recognition, employer anti-discrimination, parity of benefits, freedom of speech and from sexual persecution – further down the road for queer civilians. Rather, repeal is the outcome of a long history of opposition among queer veterans to a heterosexist equation of same-sexual practice not only with an ideology of spoiled identity but with the corporal punishment of dishonourable passions . The distinction between these two things is fundamental, the very difference between repeal as a ersatz civil rights victory and repeal as part of a broader leftist struggle for sexual and political liberation. To draw out the distinction further, though, we will have to supply a little history.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, the superb historian of sexuality George Chauncey reminds us that the battle for sexual integration in the military, far from only recently being conceived as a stepping stone toward greater rights and recognitions by the gay rights movement, has long galvanized activist energies in the military itself around the very notion of what kind of existence should be accorded to same-sexual identity. Indeed, as he points out, the formation of the first gay political organization in the United States to last more than a few months – that is to say, the first mobilization of queer civil resistance to have a public profile – was, in fact, initiated by gay veterans in the wake of World War II, to protest the policy change the military had adopted during the war, in which it moved from prosecuting individual men for homosexual behaviour to banning them altogether from service on the basis of their existence as a discrete and determinate group. In this respect, the politics of an activist same-sexual identification arose, we might say, in protest against the ontologisation of sexuality as a matter of straightforward being, rather than the queer multivocality of being that we understand by the term behaviour. It was designed to fight not simply for recognition but, rather, against wrongful recognition, to fight for the matter of sexuality to be freed from the naturalizing criteria through which the state sought to condemn it, and to be understood instead as belonging, with honour, to the field of the passions. Thus, despite Andrew Sullivan’s slavish enthusiasm for the (on-again, off-again) “tenacity” of the Obama administration, this has been the real “long game”, fought out over more than sixty years – and still being fought out, up to and including against the Obama administration itself: a battle to break out of the stigmatizing logic that finally codified queer relations in total as a crime against nature so as to screen out the more troubling problem they were made to stand in for: the naturally unnatural “anarchy” of material passions. And this becomes particularly important when queer subjectivities begin to assert themselves as collectivities in public. As William Eskridge Jr. writes:

“Today, the (homosexual) sodomite is often constructed as predatory because he is public. Although few Americans today believe that gay men and the occasional lesbian actually assault children and unsuspecting heterosexuals, they are bothered by the fact that the public celebration of homosexuality – sex for pleasure alone – is predatory in its supposed effect – namely, to lure naive children into hedonistic lifestyles and away from traditional marriage. Society itself will then fall into irreparable decay, for once traditional moral lines are blurred, the argument goes, all lines will disappear and people will do whatever they want.”

Just why the opposition on this issue has lasted so long in America is precisely because the military ban on same-sexual participation has long stood as the bulwark of a heterosexist ban more broadly on the notion of the public multidimensionality of queer lives. Homosexuals have to have just “one thing on the brain” because, in reality, they, like the plurality of people generally, have any number of things on the brain, with all kinds of obscurity attendant upon just why they may or may not select any particular one as their passion, why they might move on again from that one passion they have selected or why any passion may be perfectly compatible with any number of other passions. It is this that defines society’s permeability, its ability to be “corrupted”. So the queer that comes into public view must be reduced to the compulsive, predatorial satiation of just one lust: he or she must be identified so as to be isolated. The World War II ban on homosexuality as a category was thus devised not because authorities truly (if falsely) believed that same-sex desire interfered with a person’s ability to represent the nation, or to acquit their civic duties, but, quite to the contrary, came about because of the scandalous fact for the authorities that anti-sodomy laws did not interfere enough with queers acquitting themselves of patriotic responsibilities or civic duties just the same as any one else. In short, queerness was found to be non-localisable – or non-discrete, uncloseted even when closeted – and scandalously non-dysfunctional, which, in this lack of straight motivation, describes the very scandal attendant upon the obscurity of passionate investment itself, not only its perverse range of drives but the lack of an exact formula to determine what drives those drives. Hence, to be brokered and policed for the sake of straightforwardness of order, the queer had to be made sexological. Indeed, as Margot Canaday has shown in her remarkable history of the genesis of state discrimination in the United States against categories of sexuality, The Straight State, the movement, in wartime, toward a ban on homosexuality as an extra-individual absolute, a psychological constituency rather than the “abnormal” practice of individual passions, can be understood as the need to purge the category of individuality itself of its porous susceptibility to the “bad discipline” of uncivil appetites, a matter of particular importance in the upheaval of mass mobilisation on an unprecedented scale. It was, in this precise sense, an anti-dalliance law as much as an anti-identity law, a law that outlawed the very idea of a dalliance. In that light, the removal, all these years on, of military sexual dictates that revolve around sexual identification by the state not only admits queers (at least in theory) into consideration as equal representatives of the nation, since they can now openly wage war for it, but also allows for something much more interesting, passionate and arrhythmic – indeed, the very thing the sex-obsessed fundamentalist Right has feared the most, with all their fervid fantasising: namely, a dissolution in the terror of state persecution allowing not just for the open admission of the self-identified into the ranks of the armed forces, but re-enabling the non-identified to engage in dalliance without disobedience. The true homophobic concern is, precisely, not just that soldiers may be sleeping with members of the same sex in their private time but also with one another on the job in an entanglement of private passions and civil interests that, despite homo-hysteric fantasy, will obviously not affect the ability to be on point, to fight and serve, to do the task like any other, even as it does withhold disciplinary energies and affects from the military’s culture of assymetrical, unilateral, and pack subordination – or, is, in other word, insufficiently reproductive of the hierarchy of heterosexist social relations. And it is in this latter respect that the “anarchy” of the passions – which is deemed anarchy, of course, first and foremost from the viewpoint of the custodians of order – might, after all, turn out to be quite disruptive to the libidinal economy of authority.

It is the very real – and very radical – potential of this other dimension to actively reformulate the conduct of the military itself that led the Pentagon to be so paranoid about the idea of sexual integration in the early 90s, when DADT was first introduced. And, it is the reason why we will be sure soon to see the implementation of a strict series of sub-sectional revisions of the military code, applied to sexual congress of all kinds, as this policy advice from the libertarian Cato Institute on the need to “criminalize [any] sexual behavior that is prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the armed forces” attests. This brings us, at last, to the point that both queer opponents of the energies expended on the repeal and queer advocates of the repeal, now congratulating themselves on a job well done, seem both to have missed. In the policy note from the Cato Institute, we find a strong support for repeal, a thing that perhaps should not surprise us – libertarians are, after all, often in conflict with the values of fundamentalist conservatives – and yet this selfsame support also raises a question we ought always to ask of any right-wing philosophy we might find suddenly on our side: what is its angle on the issue of moral quarantine? With this crucial question in mind, we can see that the real purpose of the piece is to pursue a concern on the part of the author, David Rittgers, an ex-military serviceman, right-wing pundit and military legal adjudicator, that Congress and the Pentagon take the opportunity presented by repeal to put in order the “mess” of sex crime enforcement in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). As Rittgers writes:

“The definition of ‘sexual intercourse’ in the UCMJ only includes sex between a man and a woman, so the offenses of adultery, prostitution, and patronizing a prostitute under Article 134 of the UCMJ don’t apply when committed in a homosexual manner. The UCMJ should adopt a uniform standard – criminalize sexual behavior that is prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the armed forces, period.”

Here, the purpose of integration is alchemized from a move toward the abolition of prejudice in military codes disciplining sexual behaviour to a move toward disciplining the disruptiveness of sexual behaviour itself for the sake of the coherence of military codes. Thus, even as Rittgers (and the libertarian movement more broadly) claims to be interested in individualizing and liberalizing the military statutes, allowing servicemen and women well-deserved equality in their private sexual freedom, we should realise that it is, in fact, also arguing for repeal as a means to establish the need for retention of criminal controls on military sexual behaviour. As things stand legally in the wake of repeal, homosexuals in particular, as the post implicitly notes, risk being unpoliced by military authority. A uniform military code must close that loophole. But beyond that, and most importantly, the reason why it must close that loophole is because the existence of a coherent, categorical item list of sexual is tied directly to the question of successful military indoctrination – to the grounds of ‘good order’ and ‘discipline’ in the armed forces. This is precisely why Rittgers insists that a Congressional repeal, as opposed to a presidential (or court-ordered) repeal, dismantles DADT “the right way”: it assures that the implementation of sexual integration can give way to a uniform sexual segregation of practices, for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Integration, that is, legalises the shadow side of sexuality in the military so as to better police sex itself, for its own libidinal ends, the same logic that underwrote the introduction of a categorical ban on homosexuals in the first place.

In this light, just why the Left- and particularly the queer Left – seems to think that its work here is done is something of a mystery – confused at best, ideologically duped at worst. For, if anything, far from patting itself on the back for its accomplishment, queer activism should be mobilizing now more than ever, not least so as to be certain that the liberatory aspect of the repeal does not find itself aborted by a generalized re-conscription of military sexualities, a re-corporatizing of the punishment of ‘dishonourable passions’ that would curb the non-negotiable aspect of sexual freedom contained in this legislation, undoing the very reason queers – and especially queer veterans – have fought for it in the first place. Reformatting what have up until now been heterosexually oriented ordinances against such infractions of discipline as fraternization, carnal knowledge, prostitution, patronizing a prostitute and adultery would not simply extend their reach to homosexuals, who, of course, were simply expelled wholesale if they were identified prior to repeal and so had no need to be included under this list of nefarious lusts. Rather, such integration of the sexual code would restructure those infractions of discipline into a new discriminatory regime, one more suitable to the tastes of our times, which would be oriented toward the idea of sex crimes, a designation, obviously, you need to include queers in to make operational, even if you apply its ambit to manifestations of “peversity” in heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. In his accomodationist but useful book The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman spends some time trying to work out why the military tends to vote Republican. While “always a conservative institution”, he argues, it “became much more so after the mid-seventies”, with the number of self-identified Republicans amongst the military leadership rising from a third to two-thirds between 1976 and 1996. Krugman suggests this trend likely has a number of causes: the Vietnam defeat, and the Republican mobilisation of a sort of updated “stab-in-the-back” myth, in which the peace movement ostensibly brought about a collapse of the military effort; budgetary drawdown under Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; the high proportion of Southerners represented in the military, especially due to the growth of bases in the South and Southwest (incidentally, for the most part, also the poorest regions of the United States). But alongside all this, Krugman also points out that there may have been “a ‘values’ component” in the rightward shift in the American military: “as American society became more permissive, the military – where adultery is still considered a crime under certain circumstances – grew increasingly alienated”. In all of the debate over DADT and repeal, strangely absent from the conversation – except in homo-hysteric molestation fantasies from the Right – has been the plain fact that soldiers have, or want to have, sex. But it is hardly likely such a disciplinary difficulty has been far from the minds of the military establishment. I would suggest that part of the reason why the Pentagon has become a proponent of repeal is because, today, society is not more permissive, legally speaking, than the military: the paradigm of sex crimes provides such a powerful discourse of quarantine and expulsion that it supercedes the obvious and outdated discriminatory mechanism of flat, outright expulsion of queers. I would also propose that this has particular relevance in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, where the need for a stronger method of quarantining the military from the libertine-like torture it orders out of its soldiers has become all too clear. As such, I would contend that repeal has not just been about discrimination against homosexuality but, more broadly, about the sexual economy of the military itself. The question for the Left in the wake of repeal, therefore, the question that it can no longer avoid, is where it stands in regards to the crucial issue of soldiering and sex – just as the real question for queer activism is to figure out how sexuality is mobilised today by that grand capital-circulator and cannibal of citizenries known as the American war machine.

Upon the release of the Pentagon’s report into the feasibility of repeal, Defence Secretary Robert Gates insisted that changing the law had become a “matter of some urgency”. Why so? As he explained, if senators were to keep on blocking the repeal of the policy, and, moreover, Congress changed over to the Republican hands in the coming year, the federal courts would be likely to step in and force the military’s hand. In such an event, the Pentagon would be made to implement a change in policy on the court’s timetable, rather than its own. Yet, we might wonder: just what would be so terrible exactly about operating on the court’s timetable? What is at stake here, and what is so complicated about integration, that the Pentagon is so adamant it needs to introduce the transition itself, on its own terms? As the Palm Center has argued, the transition to an integrated military could take place in a mere matter of weeks – assuming that principled abolition of sexual discrimination were the plain goal here. But that is not at all clear. Take, for instance, this rather mangled statement from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen:

“…from the standpoint of a change in the law – I mean, my perspective is, as what I would call my – certainly was my personal opinion, is now my professional view, that this is a policy change that we can make. And we can do it in a relatively low-risk fashion, given the time and given the ability to mitigate whatever risk is out there through strong leadership…”

Reading through the garble, Mullen tells us that “from the standpoint of a change in the law” which has become both his personal and professional opinion, he believes this is “a policy change we can make” but only “given the time and ability to mitigate whatever risk is out there…”. But what risk? What are we to make of this low-key anxiety over the possibility of the never-specified “risks” and “difficulties” that may arise with integration? It would be tempting to credit the “need” for a transition period for implementation to stupid phobias alone, a symptom of the sincere heterosexist belief that queer sexuality is a sick hex upon the order of things. After all, sexually integrated militaries exist across the world and this has not led to the end of global militarism on these militaries’ parts. However, to assign this caution to mere homophobic idiocy is to be underrate its significance. And here, it is the “risk” of an inherently insubordinate sexual freedom leaking into the military – as well as the “difficulty” of keeping such sexual freedom out – that troubles the Pentagon. Though it believes the transition toward a sex crimes paradigm will allow it to be more “non-discriminatory” than ever, there is the possibility of an aspect to integration that the military has planned on and isn’t ready for, an ulterior dimension that could transform a calculated reform into Barthes’s “generalized subversion”. As with any inoculation, there’s always an outside chance immunization will give you the disease you’re seeking to arm yourself against.

Sexual freedom, generalized subversion, the “anarchy” of desires, which is to say, their unpredictable proclivity and polyvocality, as well as their capacity to commit too much to principle, or, even worse from the perspective of militarism, to wear off: these, of course, are the things the Left should be fighting for. But perhaps the reason it has not been quick to pursue its own agenda in this situation is because sexual freedom appears to become especially ambiguous when placed in relation to the military. Surely, for instance, sexual rights come to mean something far more sinister in the context of an invading army. And the military’s own pack libertinism – the hazing, the bored fratboy cheeriness of humiliation and abuse – would indicate that simply conferring sexual autonomy on troops would not automatically negate the hierarchy, disenfranchisement and elaborately cruel horseplay that militaristic solidarity relies on. What would it mean, in that case, practically, to be for sexual emancipation in the military? In the first place, it would mean to be against the kind of culture that tortures through sexual humiliation – the standard operating procedure of coupling abuse with the leer. Likewise, the aim of fighting for sexual freedom in the military would not be to bestow upon military units the unfettered freedom to pillage foreign populations to satiate their sexual appetites – which, at a cursory glance, arguing for the right of a soldier to freely patronize a prostitite could seemingly be taken to entail. In truth, the problem actually begins with the fact that we should even think the relaxation of sexual discipline – though not the sexual rights of anyone – would somehow unleash a cascade of depravities when the military culture that already exists systemically promulgates rampant, wholesale sexual abuse. As Mic Hunter’s work on sexual assault in the U.S. military demonstrates, intimate abuse, sexual humiliation of populations, and intimidation of fellow soldiers all tend to go together with scapegoating and institutional whitewash, with harsh punishment of certain individual perpetrators, when the military is pressed by circumstance, serving as a means of walking away from organizational responsibility. Precisely because of this, to argue for the abolition of military sexual codes is not to argue for the abolition of the applicability of any law – to let anything go, without oversight – but rather to insist upon the raising of the current, self-serving (non-)application of military codes – that is, the system of “oversight” itself – to the level of a real legal process. The core concept, that is, would be to remove military justice from the “closed set” of court-martialling, which revolves around the delivery of institutionally convenient verdicts, whether it be indictment (‘a few bad apples’) or acquittal (‘clean core’), and to confer the inspection of military behaviour, especially in sexual matters, upon a public service system, a sort of autonomous institution familiar with the military but based on the very American principle of ‘divided powers’. This system would be endowed with a prosecutorial authority able to take into account a wider ambit of context when it comes to impropriety rather than focus upon the subjective or overspecific ‘conduct’ or ‘dishonorable passions’ of individuals. It would be a form of scrutiny, in other words, that would explicitly take into critical account what Žižek has dubbed “objective violence” – or the institutional, political, situational, and extra-individual systemic factors of any given case of intimidation, violence, exploitation or coercion. And by being set up to enable sexual congress, such a system would be designed in its very constutition to go beyond the mere automatic enforcement of the big Other of a blanket ban, in which sexuality in the military is deemed officially improper ipso facto – ‘frowned upon’, as it were, even and especially when it is winked upon – which has served for so long to render the military itself, irregardless of its actions, always and everywhere virginal. A system of sexual freedom in the military would adjudicate on the libidinal co-optation of the war machine itself, its informal methods of apportioning and avoiding sexual abuse even as it disciplines sexuality. Thus, rather than another instance of what Judith Butler has rightly called the responsibilization of persons under neoliberal capital, or, in other words, the endless clamour for greater individual ethical responsibility that fuels both indifference to structural malfeasance and permits the ever-more-rampant escalation of punishments (as with “sex crimes”), the aim here would be to responsibilize the military itself and in such a way that it could neither dodge its duty toward the sexual freedom of soldiers as autonomous beings, via cynical, blanket criminalization of “dishonourable passions”, nor deny the very real dimension of sexual exploitation that the military body relies on as a sort of shadow constitution for compensating its soldiers, controlling their activities, ensuring obedience, terrorizing populations and maintaining the lure of the military as a promoter of reactionary libertinage in both peace and war.

The watchword, then, would be a critical analytics of sexuality and force, an analytics currently entirely absent from military culture or its rulebook. The Left’s battle would be for the kind of law that would take into account, when presented with an offence, the circumstances and socio-economic conditions of the place of one’s deployment, the relation of participants, whether a sexual transaction relied upon the negation of consent to discharge itself, and whether – or in what way – institutional intimidation was at work in the encounter. Under this regime, for instance, an undue number of homosexual over heterosexual charges for misconduct would be a matter of utmost relevance to any judicial decision upon sexual infractions, as such a decision would know itself also to be enforcing criteria for the enfranchisement of adult sexualities. And such criteria would not only punish sexual profiteering in warzones or harassment of fellow soldiers but would warrant inspection of the de facto application of misconduct procedures against sexuality, against the kind of disobedience that begins in the honorably gratuitous and the honorably intimate. Likewise, from the other angle, procuring prostitution, even off-duty, in a context of disaster – whether self-made, like the confused imperial war in Afghanistan, or evental, like military-humanitarian intervention in Haiti after the earthquake – would be understood as a markedly different phenomenon from doing so in a context of peace, stability and agreed assent, where one is sufficiently able to be temporarily yours. If such a system of oversight would likely be scoffed at by ‘experts’ as endlessly disruptive and utterly unrealistic, exactly because it would entail an elaborate, ethically-dense factoring-in of the conditions of proper sexual practice in any specific context in which one served, a scenario in which orders would have to be given anew in relation to each deployment and each specific operation, under explicit over-arching guidelines that insist upon the inviolability of individual sexual rights as well as the intolerability of sexual abuse, all this stuff that militaries should not have to worry themselves with, I would suggest that this is all evidence of just why such a regime is essential, and just why it is only the Left can pursue it. To be sure, the real issue here is not one of capability – after all, as we’re constantly told, the military responds with astonishing flexibility to split second corrections in operational command, all the time. Rather, the reason such a system would be classified as ‘unfeasible’ (and the reason why ending DADT has been feasible) is because it revolves around fear of the prospect of soldiers being allowed and encouraged to exercise their analytical muscle beyond orders and operational execution, that they be expected to engage in critical adjudication of the context and consequence of their actions, with strong awareness of the eminently exploitative scenario in which their sexual conduct takes place. Consequently, the problem for the Left is that it has not taken seriously the insistence by the Right that we cannot afford the ‘disruption’ of integration, most especially in a time of war, or that, if we can, we must be ever so careful about how we implement it. For this phobic fear is, at base, born out of a need to foreclose any possibility of the emergence of an anti-authoritarian soldiery, a soldiery not formed upon the indoctrinated loyalty of obedience and conformity but upon the dishonourable passions of struggle, solidarity and even fraternity with the enemy. Such an anti-authoritarian possibility is one that the spectre of sexual liberation has always implicitly brought with it, especially when it comes to the military. And with it, it draws us toward a truly radical prospect, the possibility of a military without militarism. This is what all the inchoate anxiety from the Right has always been about.

As we can now see, the failure of queers to think through the relation of the queerness of sexuality itself to the possibility of anti-militarism in the military – the focus on arguing over whether DADT was a useful, if discriminatory, prop for keeping queers queer and out of the American war machine – is precisely why we have had such a bifurcated and wholly dissatisfying response to repeal, a split between a spectacle of subservient festivity and overmoralized contempt. Beyond the matter of citizenship and equality, the importance of the DADT repeal lies in the fact that it acknowledges, despite itself, that there are other reasons to be committed, and other attachments to be had, beyond orders and machismo and trivial cruelty and hierarchical duty: reasons and attachments queer soldiers, as the patriotic unwanted, the outcasts who have always shown up all the same, have also always quite uniquely represented. Yet if the queer radicals have clouded the issue by parsing anti-militarism out from the possibility of anti-militarism in the military itself, what has really occluded any calibrated understanding of this moment is the fact that the mainstream of queer activism has failed to conceive of repeal as anything other than a civil rights milestone. Framing sexual integration as a victory for civil rights insists that inclusion within the nation is a transparently radical thing, a breakthrough for the realisation of queer rights. And while we cannot deny that repeal is, indeed, a blow against a long history of homophobia, this does not mean that it is clear boon for queer emancipation thereby. Queers have always deserved to be in the military not because they’re the same as any other American but because they have been marked out as not being the same by a heterosexism that decided their difference made all the difference. Because it has been the Right that insists there’s some real reason why citizenship had to be abridged in the first place when it came to one’s sexuality, undoing that prejudice is simply not a victory for queers in the sense of a great day for their collective emancipation even as it is absolutely a breakthrough for queer equality in terms of punching a fatal hole through an ideology that has thrived on interpolating the military and the nation solely in terms of values-conservatism. In the latter sense, repeal can be understood as a minor but important achievement in the ongoing battle for the autonomy of citizenship, the freedom of community from being owned and operated by the aristocracy of narrow, well-funded, classist bigotry. The end of DADT strikes a blow against conservative elites who think citizenship is, or should be, their own private class property, to confer or revoke at their pleasure. The problem is, however, that values-conservatism is not the only opponent – and perhaps, today, not even the key opponent – to the realisation of queer civil rights as part of a broader Left-wing agenda. Exactly because citizenship is treated as class property by the market-state itself, liberal and libertarian elites also connive to deploy militarism, classism and nationalism in terms of citizenship, in an ideological nexus of reactionary permissions that we could call rights-conservatism. And it is the existence of this rights-conservatism that brings us to the heart of the ambivalence the Left is feeling about repeal, the equivocation as to whether it is actually, when all is said and done, a victory for the Left.

With repeal, queerness finds itself explicitly entangled in representations of the nation as a righteous guarantor of individual rights. Of course, “explicitly” is the key word here: such an entanglement is not new or unprecedented. To be sure, in the ostensibly “post-ideological” era of Clintonism and the new world order, DADT was confected precisely to broker a rapproachment between the heterosexism of the military body and the liberal pluralism it now muscularly and triumphantly represented. And why the compromise was acceptable to the Pentagon was because it also actively integrated the military into the new ideological composition of the post Cold War liberal-democratic nation: after DADT, the armed forces could stay straight by policing the queer within, even as they could induct into their ranks the patriotic queer in a manner which revolved around the inviolability of private rights. Thus, the philosophy of DADT operated according to this logic: “whoever you really are is of no concern to us, we defenders of a non-ideological open society of individuality and tolerance, so long as you serve and do your duty (even though who you really are is of obsessive concern to us, as it is a matter of loyalty and obedience, and we will scrutinize you no end, since who you are when you serve us is anything but private, so far as we’re concerned).” From this, we’ve graduated today to a new context of a full-blown alliance between war and civil advocacy, an alliance from which there has emerged a different paradigm of the nation, what queer theorist Jasbir Puar has dubbed a homonationalism. In this new frame of mind, because we ostensibly stand opposed to a terroristic fundamentalist nightmare best delineated by its shocking lack of tolerance for queers and women, tolerance is now the new proof positive of our bottomline advancement over our backward enemies, not to mention the golden hearted universalism that puts our rapacious neo-colonial war-exploitationism on the right side of history. For the liberals who introduced it, DADT – and the fundamentalist conservatism it today represents – now stands as a distinct disadvantage to the ideological grounds which undergird the new “civilized” pursuit of the war against terror. Repeal, in that sense, can be appreciated as an argument as to why the war on terror simply cannot be a conservative war, if it is to be waged properly and coherently. In this light, we can begin to understand why it is that McCain abandoned his previous support for repeal. The problem was not so much repeal itself – we’ve already accounted for the conservative possibility of retaining segregation through sex controls – but, rather, the fact that regulating aversion (to use political scientist Wendy Brown’s phrase) also regulates the homegrown homophobia of conservative fundamentalist militarism, the homophobia which, in being overturned “in a time of war”, suggests that there is a lack of self-sufficiency in the heterosexism of adhering to the conservative reaction that spearheaded the fight all through the aughts. In other words, liberals are sending the message that conservatives are simply no longer the right kind of straights for this contest. McCain’s own testimony might even be seen to display an awareness, however dim, of this: “‘At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,’ he said bluntly, before describing it as ‘imperfect but effective.’” Emphasis on effective.

The overwhelming feeling, however, was that it was not effective, a point even some Republicans were willing to concede. Crucially, however, these Republican doubters were all libertarian. Much has been made of the fact that the vote for repeal was decidedly lopsided: it passed in the Senate by 65 to 31. Much has also been made of the role Joe Lieberman played in proceedings, particularly the fact he managed to bring over the key block of Republicans that made this vote bipartisan. And certainly, if repeal is to be seen as a victory for anything, it was a victory for bankrupt bipartisanship, which is why Lieberman stands at the smiling center of all this. Though not a libertarian himself, given that his ideological proclivities tend toward the most repulsive stance on basically all issues, wherever the political orientation of that stance should lie, Lieberman represents nonetheless an advocate for the perfectly reactionary nature of the notion of the right to individual liberty that the support on the Right for repeal has stemmed from. His appeal to the Right to back the repeal, the argument around which he rallied the small cohort that eventually helped vote the ban down, was grounded specifically on the libertarian logic that this was unavoidably a personal liberty issue, whatever one might think of same-sexual practices from the perspective of good taste and values. However, far from thanking Lieberman for displaying craft and quick thinking on this issue, we should understand that his appearance as a key number cruncher was due to the fact libertarian support of the repeal was be won not as a break with conservatism but based on the argument that to support repeal was, strategically speaking, a smart thing for farsighted conservatives to do. Perhaps we could give real credit to Lieberman for achieving a more principled victory for gay rights themselves if he’d managed to convince even one values-conservative to come over to vote for repeal, but he did not. This, however, was hardly the point. For the libertarians, the important thing was not to convince or to break with their conservative colleagues but, rather, to be assured that voting for repeal would allow them to step forward as the vanguard of a conservative domestication of rights back into the regime of privacy. In essence, the failure in the ability of values-conservatism to be able to advance the national security agenda of the market-state on this issue – to follow through on the ideology of America as the great advancer of universal private rights, to keep out a possible introduction of a public dimension – privileged the discourse of rights-conservatism as the more effective, and capital-friendly, national conservatism of the moment. This is precisely why the libertarians felt able to cleave off as a unit from their fundamentalist peers without undue concern for the consequences. And their solidarity in this matter was surely not hurt either by the fact that the Federal Court had already reached the determination that DADT was unconstitutional. As Lieberman was at pains to point out to the libertarian bloc of Republicans, this decision of the courts left them one last chance to seize control of the issue before DADT would either (a) be knocked over anyway by the ‘liberal’ judiciary, if Obama chose not to appeal; or (b) face a values-conservative Supreme Court more likely than not to go ahead and constitionalize the prejudice, an act that would certainly violate the right-wing libertarian conscience about interference in the right to privacy; that would, in other words, create a real crisis of doctrines on the Right, a fracture similar to the cultural-economic divide that has so bedevilled the Left. Ironically, then, for libertarians, to vote for repeal can be understood as voting to forestall a division within the Right, voting to be able to remain on the Right, in alliance with fundamentalist conservatives, by containing the chance of a values victory that would force the libertarian faction to go to war against their allies. Is it any surprise at all that such a display of reactionary political ecology should find itself overseen by Joe Lieberman?

In a recent thought-provoking book on conservative politics since the seventies, David Courtwright has argued that there has, in fact, been no right turn in America, despite all the feverish belief to the contrary. For all the efforts by fundamentalist conservatives to expunge the moral and sexual revolutions from American culture, he argues, they have not been turned back: “the more the liberals lost at the polls, the more their wicked works seemed to prosper”. If moral conservatives increased prison populations, if they captured the airwaves, if they filled the legislature with Republicans, what they nevertheless seemed entirely unable to do was really set their mark upon the culture by revoking abortion, or reinstalling school prayer, or achieve some definitive prohibition upon the culture of obscenity, dissolute behaviour like gambling and drinking, and, of course, gay rights. They could seemingly slow things up, even engage in cultural lynchings, but to actually stop or even reverse the trend seemed maddeningly out of reach. But how come? Part of the reason for this inability to achive a conservative counterrevolution in morals, Courtwright insists, is the fact that fundamentalist conservatism has needed to rely upon libertarianism as its ideological coalition partner in the great reorganisation of American political life. The “psychological unity of the ascendant conservatives masked their sociological disunity”, he writes, and at the heart of this disunity was the fact that “the free market was not, and never had been, a morally conservative institution”. He continues:

“Capitalism created not only winners and losers, but also wealth, temptations, intrusions, and distractions at odds with conservative religious values and moral self-discipline. The solution – to declare certain commerical activities and innovations off-limits – would have clashed with corporate interests.”

Thus, fundamentalist conservatism found its agenda retarded by its allies, the libertarians, just as the libertarians, too, found themselves frustrated in their efforts to utterly undo the New Deal or bring federal spending under control by the statism of the fundamentalists. The result, Courtwright concludes, has been a kind of stalemate within the Right, built upon an irreconcilable conflict of interests, as well as the paradox of a cross-contamination whereby fundamentalist conservatives, through the mechanisms of their agitation, can only spread the very social dissolution they decry while libertarians actively empower a majority that wishes to curtail the libertinage of capital even as it bloats state spending. All in all, it is a compelling thesis, but we should be careful to check the ingredients before we buy it wholesale. Because while there is no doubt that there is real antagonism between the constituencies on the Right, Courtwright’s argument draws such a sharp distinction between them that it doesn’t quite make sense of why it is those constituencies would align together at all, except, perhaps, for a lack of alternative partners. Indeed, the implicit logic in this argument is that the two conservatisms are only married by convenience: the libertarians are not conservatives morally (since capital isn’t morally conservative, ostensibly) while the fundamentalists are not conservatives economically (since moral persecution doesn’t rely on classism, apparently). Moreover, it implies that each constituency does not contain contradictions within itself, which ignores the fact that fundamentalism thrives on a certain prurient stoking of dirty desires or that libertarianism can only sustain its capital-intensive plunder by bloating the federal trade deficit beyond any conservative measure. Past all this, however, Courtwright’s thesis also misunderstands something absolutely essential to the ideological make-up of libertarianism: its necessary and non-voluntary relation to the fundamentalism of the Right. More than anything, the situational purpose of libertarianism is not to account for economic conservatives who aren’t also moral conservatives but, rather, to parlay Leftist freedom back into rights-conservatism. True: unlike a values-conservative “conscience”, which can easily endorse state interference in the formal recognition of the rights of others, a rights-conservative “conscience” holds that there should be no undue state interference in the equality of individual rights – a view which could appear to be non-conservative in certain circumstances, and which certainly can lead to fierce conflict with fundamentalism. Yet, in strict opposition to both of these views, the Left insists that there can be no such thing as real rights without those rights being placed in relation to the commons, which requires, therefore, an intervention by the social welfare state, at bare minimum, to guarantee them in practice, or, in anarchocommunistic terms, even the abolition of the market-state altogether, seeing as it is necessary to remove the interference of the market-state and the interested class bigotry of any given conservative elite if rights are ever to be properly realised. In other words, the Left argues not for the equality of individual rights alone but demands the socialisation of the equality of individual rights so that they may be actualised by everyone they apply to. And it is here we find the point of mandatory alliance between libertarianism and fundamentalism: their shared conservative opposition to socialisation, a principle which is axiomatic to any emancipatory Left. Thus, the values-conservative fundamentalist “conscience” denies the idea that the nation exists to represent all persons within it: the nation-state is specific, it should stand for the maintainence of certain racial, religious and class purities. And the rights-conservative libertarian “conscience” agrees insofar as these racial, religious, national and class purities are required to promulgate the expansion of the market-state and forestall socialisation. To put it more clearly, libertarianism denies the fact that there is massive interference from the market-state around who can afford to express their rights when they’re granted. It rejects the notion that it takes more than the rights themselves to be equal in word for them to be equal in practice. And, in this precise sense, it is instinctively sympathetic to fundamentalist conservatism, because this denial is tied to the need to maintain a hierarchy of class, a hierarchy the hatreds of the fundamentalist Right are only too happy to naturalise. The two are, in point of fact, quite mutually enamoured partners, except in those rare moments when the indispensable libertarian belief in itself as the true defender of individual liberty for all – a belief essential to perpetuating the ideologically integrity of the delusion that conservatism is an ecumenical philosophy – becomes endangered by the bigotry of the interests conservatism represents, when fundamentalism wants to deny rights so absolutely it would affect libertarians themselves. At these sticking points, libertarianism will certainly turn its back on the prejudicial partiality of conservative hates but only so as to be sure they are reinstituted along class lines. Thus, even when liberatarian-republicans will take credit for extending entitlements, they will fight tooth and nail against social infrastructure and state support to equalize rights once they’re granted, and here fundamentalist conservatives will once again join them, the erstwhile couple become comrades-in-arms once again. Far from strange bedfellows, then, they must be appreciated as the two, allied sides of the elitist contradiction of capitalist conservatism itself. And in this way, it would take a blanket denial of rights to split the Right definitively apart, a disenfranchisement that touched libertarian members personally, not the denial of means for the poor or uninstitutionalised to actualise the rights they’ve been emptily awarded. The purpose, accordingly, of the libertarian Right (whether it knows it or not) is to secure a pluralism within conservatism – a coalition of conservative interests, an evangelicalism of conservatism as the philosophy of every individual – even as it disenfranchises the bulk of those to whom it ostensibly helps to confer rights – the values-conservative core of the thing. In this sense, while the Log Cabin Republicans must feel so good about themselves after repeal, just that little bit more able to live with their socially conscienceless hypocrisy – because they too now (or so they believe) are moving toward the position of citizenship conservatives, able, at last, like true Americans, to decide who counts – us, of course! – and who doesn’t – illegal immigrants, for instance, or Muslims, or even the poor who find that the only way to gain a future they couldn’t otherwise afford is to serve in the military, to risk their lives to gain the entitlements of citizenship, like a college education, not deemed worthy to be provided for them gratis, as mere human lives living under laws – they needn’t feel too good about themselves, seeing as libertarianism demands they collude in the perpetuation of the fundamentalist conservatism that abhors them as a class. This trade-off is exactly why repeal cannot be seen, in any way, as a civil rights victory unto itself.

That queers are free now to be able to make up their minds on whether to serve, without having to worry whether ‘gay’ should mean ‘able to represent the United States’, and without the witch-hunt of state persecution, is an activist achievement. But its implementation in law has been a libertarian and liberal coup before it has been a direct leftist advance alone. For both, the homonationalist element is what secures the justice of the change as well as its inherent conservatism, a classic case of regulating emancipation synonymous with the civil Right. On this count, we can take note of a recent, fascinating turn of events in the U.N. In November of last year, the U.N. General Assembly’s human rights committee approved an Arab and African proposal to cut a reference to “slayings due to sexual orientation” from a resolution on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions. The next month, the U.S. had seen that the prohibition on murder on the basis of sexual orientation had been restored to the resolution. Yet, when it came to the vote, here’s what conspired: “After ensuring that violence against gays would be back in the resolution by voting in favor its own amendment, Washington sent an ambiguous signal about its support for the overall declaration by joining 61 other nations in abstaining.” If ever there were a textbook demonstration of what homonationalism is about, this is it: a writ for the justice and civility of one’s own violence, which need not, thereby, be bound by a legally binding resolution not to arbitarily kill. And even conservatives can come to see the wisdom in that kind of insurance, though they need their libertarian counterparts to show them the way. Thereupon, the must important thing to remember about repeal is the fact that it does nothing to alter the fundamentally asymmetrical relation of an enfranchising and disenfranchising power to the people over which it rules, even if the limits of that power and the uses to which it is put are reformatted and bickered about by its administrators over time. Fundamentalists, libertarians, liberals: from far Right to rights-conservative to civil Right, they all stand by the natural right of authority to exempt itself from the laws it claims to stand for, to rule from the state of exception. For Leftist queers, as for all the disenfranchised and anyone else who wants a better world than this one for absolutely everybody, the battle to repeal the dictatorship of an owner-class, to integrate the world to the realization – not just the empty guarantee – of equality, to struggle for an authority that thrives upon the notion that the freedom of rights may not be revoked, the fight, at the last, for no exception to this rule, thus goes on.

Does a democratic government have a right to its secrets? According to all officials of note in the West and the East – a curious universal chorus of dictators, democrats, business leaders, diplomats and the large bulk of the international media – the answer is an emphatic absolutely. In fact, even those institutions which applaud (or speculate upon the inherent news interest of) the recent cable dump also proceed to quickly caution us against the dangerous lack of realism inherent in total disclosure. As Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time, remarks in a recent editorial:

For Julian Assange, when it comes to government and diplomacy, there are no good secrets. To him, all transactions between nations and leaders should be transparent. In my conversation with him on Nov. 30 via Skype, I asked him whether he thought all secrets were harmful and unnecessary. He replied that he believed in the necessity of keeping his own sources secret and took great pains to do so. Now, there is some hypocrisy in defending secrecy in order to attack it, but there is more naiveté and even danger in suggesting that the world is a safer place without any secrets at all.

Ah, accusations of hypocrisy and naiveté: the first and final refuge of capitalist realists! But let us come back to the question of whether Assange really does think all secrets are harmful and unnecessary in a moment. For now, simply note how Assange is figured not only as an idealist but also as a fanatic of honesty – fanaticism, as Alberto Toscano has shown, always being the deadly drive liberal democracy divines in every one of its designated enemies – while the cooler-heads of well-paid institutional news soberely acknowledge the righteousness of the correction this leak provisions against an unsettling bloat in government secrecy only then to cluck over the reckless vandalism of a good deed taken too far. Lest we be confused, however, Stengel assures us that Time is well within its rights to publish the cables. It is not acting hypocritically or naively, of course: only loyally. For while government “opposes the publication of any classified material,” the authors of the U.S. Constitution – that ultimate unaccountable authority – “understood that letting the government rather than the press choose what to publish was a very bad idea in a democracy”. Yet, one might point out that for all this rhetoric of honouring democracy and the Constitution, Time does not seem overly concerned to honour a less lofty duty of the press, a duty the media has junked as thoroughly as frank and fearless journalism: namely, the imperative to protect your source. Thus, having abandoned the government for the Constitution ever so briefly, Stengel hastily signs himself back up as the humble subject of the power of the day when he writes: “It seems inarguable that the release of 251,287 documents via WikiLeaks harms American national security and that Assange meant to do so. Whether he is guilty under the U.S. Espionage Act is unclear, but the right of news organizations to publish those documents has historically been protected by the First Amendment.” In an astonishingly mendacious covering of one’s own arse, the dissemination and coverage of the leaks is therefore not to be taken as criminal even though the initial dissemination and publication of the leaks may well be. With an obscene lack of solidarity, Time – here only too representative of mainstream media organizations worldwide – does not mobilise in an effort to agitate and defend its media source but airily abandons that source to the vengeful machinations of the market-state. No wonder news outlets have recently decided to stop calling Wikileaks a ‘whiste-blower’: through that lens, the implications of this craven desertion are much too obvious and unseemly.

But this returns us to the matter posed above: does a democratic goverment have a right to its secrets? Moreover, can we, indeed, call Assange a whistle-blower if he does in fact believe that all secrets are harmful and unncessary? Does the apparent comprehensiveness of the leak – covering the most routine of internal governmental transactions – undo his claim to be crusading against human rights violations, abuses and misinformation? In a classic piece of obfuscation also run by Time, Fareed Zakaria has argued that the Wikileak cables should be taken not as a scandal but, rather, a relief from worry, a load off our minds! Implicitly framing the leaks against the mass manipulation of intelligence we know went on in the Bush years, Zakaria argues that the cables show a democratic government in good health: a U.S. diplomatic core engaged in very little deception – nothing at all like the Ellsberg Papers, he insists – and quite strong on analysis, populated by “clever minds”, “pursuing privately pretty much the policies it [the state] has articulated publicly.” Never mind the fact that the cables have displayed a gob-smackeningly obvious and twistedly profound hatred of democracy – to use Chomsky’s entirely warranted phrase: spying on the UN leadership, pressuring the Spanish attorney-general to obstruct that nation’s probe into CIA rendition and Guantánamo, taking what can only be called an unofficial tithe from allies, covering up bombing another nation’s territory in complicity with that nation’s government, colluding with Britain to defy a cluster bomb ban on its territory, to name just a few examples. Moreover, it is not only the US that is implicated in this hatred: indeed, what makes this dump so remarkable is that U.S. intelligence, as we might expect, acts as a mass clearing house of information on endemic manipulation of the public trust across the globe – for instance, Berlusconi profiting from secret deals with Putin, the Saudi regime, even as it retains official links to the funding of al-Qaeda, agitating for an invasion of Iran amid an antagonism between power elites that certainly rivals that sclerotic regime for obsessiveness, cynicism and fundamentalism, and the free Afghanistan we are supposedly fighting the good fight for finally revealed for that which we have long known it to be: “a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest official is a distinct outlier.” Thus, the seemingly valid point Zakaria makes – that these cables do not display a secret of the homocidal magnitude of American war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – deliberately overlooks the fact that it is not the sheer explosive revelatory nature of these cables that makes them so shocking but the total acceptance everywhere in them of the wisdom of habitual and quotidian corruption, a sort of sardonic running commentary or ‘strong analysis’ on the ‘poetic enlightenment’ that comes from manuevring around the rules at every loophole or in the face of any minor inconvenience they should pose. And it should be remembered that these cables are only material from the lowest levels of classification, accessible to someone as minor as a first class private, unlike the Ellsberg papers.

If we were to accept, then, with Zakaria, with Stengel, with all our political talking heads, that such corruption is simply the way the world works, the unavoidable operation of government in a global realm of deceptive, hostile structures and actors, then we would indeed be led to conclude that such a mass release of sensitive information can only be harmful – even as we somewhat contradictorily play off the idea of anything of consequence in the leak and stonewall against any notion that there are any really disreputable dimensions to the cables which would warrant a serious public reckoning. As such, when we argue that a government has a right to its secrets, we should have the courage to acknowledge that what we are also necessarily saying is that we believe that the state has the right to conspire. At this point, we can turn back to Assange. In the interview with Time referenced by Stengel in his op-ed above, Assange does not say that the world is a safer place without any secrets in it at all. Secrecy, he explains, has its place, but it should not be used to cover up abuses. In releasing such a comprehensive archive of documentation, of course, the counterargument advanced by the ‘responsible’ media has been that Assange is simply contradicting himself and, by his actions, reveals his true, certainly misguided, possibly even terroristic intention: that is, not to expose abuses but to sabotage the very channels of government secrecy themselves. Yet, this slight of hand steals away the real point like a thief in the night. For if Wikileaks is, indeed, sabotaging the channels of government secrecy, this is precisely because it is presenting to the public, via this sabotage, what is perhaps the greatest single abuse that the organization has exposed to date: namely, the fact that the channels of government secrecy are thoroughly corrupt as a system. While even Assange acknowledges that governments may need to deliberate in secret, this document dump points to a key question about this secrecy that states worldwide increasingly work to repress: in a word, should secrecy be conceived as a right of government? Or are secrets, rather, a responsibility of the state? Allow me to be clear. By responsibility, I do not mean here the unavoidable burden of having to conceal from the people the truth of an international domain grounded on lies and sneaky interests, the pressing weight of world issues those oh-so-selfless realists we elect are forced by fate and money to bravely bear on our behalf. In other words, I do not refer to the great responsibility our politicians love to tell us comes with great power, these Peter Parkers one and all. Rather, I mean the responsibility for secrecy the state ought to assume, in which secrets would be understood as that operation of governance which government should not just rely on but, rather, in order to be honest, should be required to govern within itself. Far from a legitimate tool of government, in this sense, secrets should actually be seen as extra-governmental powers, insofar as they are matters which are withheld from the deliberation of the democratic public sphere. If they are indeed a structural requirement of governance, it does not follow that they are the natural right of government, but precisely a state of exception in which a government takes definitive leave of responsiveness to democracy and so must be scrupulously open to measures which, in turn, make it all the more responsible for the secrets it keeps to itself. Conceptualized in this way, to act responsibly toward secrecy in government would be to design what Reid Kane has called a counter-institutional politics that establishes independent oversight, like a people’s judiciary, and defends the democratic state from the manipulation of secrecy itself.

Surely one of the most disturbing (but not exactly surprising) aspects of this whole thing has been the way in which the governments of the West have treated these leaks as though they were a violation of privacy. This underlying idea that a state secret is a private right – the very ground zero of the aggreived claim that what Assange has done simply must be ‘illegal’ – is so dangerous it hardly has bounds. All those on the side of democracy in any meaningful sense must assert now and together this dictum: a government secret is not its private property. And it is the general consensus among our elites to the contrary that is, more than anything, the conspiracy that Wikileaks is seeking to turn against itself: this universal convergence that unites dictators and democrats upon the privatization of the commons of state secrecy in a nexus of business-government rights to them as their exclusive property. To put it another way, for a confidential public interest to be truly public and not just secretive, it must be able to function as if any one of the public which it ostensibly represents could be taken into its confidence – even if a general revelation of that secret to everyone everywhere would be damaging to its integrity. This definitive alienation of democratic governmental secrecy from its inherently public nature, even when it is a classified secret – its transformation into the unaccountable privilege of the private market-state – is nothing else then but the enshrinement of the right to conspire, to plot, to profiteer, to dodge knowledgeability, to do dirty deals, always in the name of national security and the best interests of the people for whom such secrecy is privatized. In that sense, Wikileaks has been so comprehensive in its document dumping, I suspect, not because it aims to destroy the ability of government to keep any information secret, or even the possibility of secrecy per se, but rather because it aims to destroy the immunity of the private-property-relation that government (and business) rely upon to assert their unchallengable prerogative over the public and democratic representativeness of a secret’s confidentiality. It has not been good enough, in short, to expose only lies and misinformation. The leaks have had to anull the very structure of privacy – as opposed to public secrecy – that has fed into this right to conspire, that fuels the deliberate blur between the ‘legitimate’ secrets of our democratic governments and the ‘necessity’ of their dirty deals, the very deals that make us want to keep their secrets at arm’s length from ourselves, so that their bad actions can remain their property and not, as it ought to be, ours. If we oppose Wikileaks, therefore, we do so only out of this brand of bad faith, not legitimate concern for our own interests and safety. And in so doing, we are giving away much more than our right to know. We are conferring upon the market-state the right to own as its sole property the sovereign decision over just what exactly it is that we, as the citizens it no longer serves but secures, can be free to understand about our world.

“Rally to restore sanity and/or march to keep fear alive”: the hilarious non-duality of the Stewart/Colbert combo recalls a similar joke from The Simpsons in which news anchor Kent Brockman declares with CNN-breathlessness: “Welcome to Election ’96: America Flips a Coin’. Almost fifteen years on, The Simpsons has become something of a time-serving public spokesperson in its own right but in that earlier episode, now iconic, when the show still had a critique to make instead of a conscience to please, America faces an election so absurdly literalized it is actually being run by two aliens of the same race, aliens who are intent on taking over the world, while disabling all opposition to their invasion, the only viable way: democratically. Similarly, even if it does not loudly declare it, the slogan of the Stewart/Colbert rally insists that it is the distorted American mentality toward the democratic options on offer – in which keeping fear alive or restoring the sanity of the status quo are the only coin flip – that must, in itself, serve as the rallying point for a new attitude toward democracy. If there is any problem with the rally, then, it is only that it risks, like The Simpsons, winding up a mash note to the politics of moderation, rather than the first glimmer of a grand countermanifestation, a long march against the insanity of actually existing democracy itself.

In this sense, it would be – and is proving to be – all too easy to lazily reduce the limitations of the Stewart/Colbert rally to the glib judgment that it is just another exercise in festival Leftism. Never mind the fact that the Right wing’s seizure of the Bahktinian carnivalesque – as personified in the figure of its master jester, Beck – does not come in for a panning by the same critics on the grounds of its uselessness, and even though that rallying too dresses its politics in the drag of a patently disingenuous apoliticism all the better to declare its political intentions with. Here, we face a far more serious issue than the ostensible apoliticism or liberal moderation of the Stewart/Colbert rally: namely, the ubiquity among intellectuals today of floating and uncommitted Leftism – especially in the US – with its compulsive tendency toward immediate sectarianism: its kneejerk need to place critique before solidarity. As if the true purpose of Leftist critique, what grounds and orientates it as Leftist, weren’t meant to be solidarity. Or what used to be known, in less benighted times, as comradeliness. In precisely this sense, we should praise the efforts of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. For the fact that there’s a widespread countermanifestation of political opposition at this point, that an occasion for it has arisen, even if organized under the banner of mild-mannered anti-extremism, is important. And important too is the refusal of Stewart and Colbert to allow the ongoing corruption of media platforms by such spectacular orgies of submission to our capitalist reality as Beck’s rally to ‘restore honor’. In this, they are the true intellectuals today, both in their refusal to allow Beck’s honour to reign as honour – his honour which is the kind of ideological duck soup in which nothing could ever be an exception to the most abject submission to reality (as opposed to the promise of a puncturation in that reality, a Real exception to it) – and in their call for us all to join them in rejecting the mass intellectual ingratiation to this reality that Lacan calls le service des biens – the service of wealth.

The critiquers are not wrong. This rally is not enough. And a communization movement a la the ongoing war on the ground in California – blacked out by the media – over education cuts continues to be overlooked when it evidences what could serve as the start of a real transformative people’s protest. On this point, however, it’s just as well to point out that nobody was mandating that John Stewart and Co. were to be the only entertainment on the day. What we Left intellectuals should have been taking as our overriding priority was this thought: when will there be another opportunity like this to have so many Left-leaning Americans assembled in one place? In between acts, the rally was a perfect opportunity for activists to circulate among and give speeches to the constituency of the crowd – that which communicative capitalism works so hard to occlude – to really rally on how much more needs to be done, on organization and solidarity and how token registration of discontent is strangling the action of discontent. The point of this rally – what makes it a truly encouraging sign – was that it was not just another exercise in blog theory – the domain of tenured (if imperilled) academic critique. It is as though the Left believes you’d have to be signed up to the moderate agenda of the rally to be at the rally, that not to be so, to rally without being fully committed to the programme, would somehow not be ethical. And this purism – what Mark Fisher has called the Leftism of the beautiful soul – is fundamental in obstructing momentum for mobilisation – since, the masses, unlike the immaculate conception, never seem to get it wholly. The time for an alliance between the intellectual and the crowd is thus always forestalled by a combination of ethics and inertia, a mix of critique and passive receptiveness toward cultural events as phenomena for study rather than formations for determined intervention.

However, lest it seem the rhetoric here be leaning toward sympathy for the ongoing cultural pastime (especially among academics of the Left) of lambasting the academic Left for its detached inaction, we must realize that this Left is astute in being underwhelmed by Stewart’s modest and sober presentation of the rally. For Stewart, the event stands as a right between two wrongs: between the polarization of America between Right wing brutality and Left wing wackiness. As such, the exasperating conservatism entrenched in the decision to organize a rally around the value of civility and civil culture encapsculates a belief that Stewart, if he doesn’t hold it personally, does little to refute: namely that the Left, on its own fringe, stands as equally lunatic as the Right. What the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ was most categorically not about was the notion that there is a way to be radically extreme without also being a party of barely contained intimidating mass thuggery. Just so, the politics of moderation are, indeed, a huge part of what enervates these displays of mass energy, ruins their effectiveness in advance, makes them little more effective than a strongly-worded letter to the local congressman. In this sense, the ‘purist’ criticism of the rally must be understood as stemming from what we would have loved to have seen from this demonstration: that it emerge as an exercise in radical outrage – and maybe even lawlessness – but an outrage and lawlessness that would be simultaneously the antithesis of the Right’s attempt to marry Ma and Pa America with the stormtrooper leagues.

In a way, the rhetoric of the rally, such as it stands, ellipses into the tired old (and grandly post-political) tradition in American politics that is best known as the vital center, articulated by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the Cold War 50s, in a bid to define the Democrats against both the Republicans and the New Deal socialism ‘of despair’ – a code for communism. While I doubt Stewart’s personal philosophy would baulk much at the word socialism, or indeed at the word radical, the idea of a grand zone of radical compromise that would also be inherently Leftist – and so shut the Right out of the political settlement for good – is at least as big a delusion as belief in the possibility that there could ever be a moderate Right, rather than a conservative reaction that is only more or less empowered in its radicality or in duration more or less structurally tamed. This philosophy is fuzzily nostalgic too, mismembering the mid-decades of the last century as some historically profound non-conservative or more leftist oriented moment in American political history, where great things happened, like landing a man on the moon or the vaccine for Polio. Since the Right was always radical, the vital center was built on the notion that a moderation in politics would phase out Rightism altogether: it was the politics of non-polarity. In truth, however, and in not-so-strange an act of transference, we actually see that missing moderate Right – that which John McCain was ostensibly supposed to represent, at least until the 2008 presidential election did away with that delusion – is liberal-leftism itself: hence, the fact the pathological parasite that is the ‘blue dog’ Democrat can even exist. As such, left-wing voices ought to be bothered by the fact that Stewart and Colbert – both hugely intelligent guys with great personable appeal and a large media platform – haven’t been bolder in refusing a certain ecumenical niceness begged for by a flailing apologetic politics of capitalism mortified by crisis. And these voices are also warranted in their disappointment that the two advocates did not enact a sharper vision, one that would have seen the ‘March to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ renamed something like ‘March for a New Democracy and/or Brand of Exploitation’. There is a simple lesson to be had here: if the battle is between the Right wing and the centre zone, then there is no battle really, since the centre zone will always cede way to the Right. Why? Because the centre’s refusal of the Left is always, first and foremost, a refusal to resist the one-way polarization to the Right. In a different and less forgiving era, it would have been called collaborationism.

Let’s extend the consequences of this argument. On the eve of the midterms, we find a deep division in response to events on the Left. On the one hand, we have the pragmatism of those who point out – to a large extent correctly – that with the knotted and fucked nature of a stagnated political scene, the violent demolitionism of the Republicans, the complex of issues blown open by the Bush administration, from Afghanistan to the economic crisis, that cannot be solved by a magic bullet or a magic Negro, the anger toward the Democrats at this midterm is ideologically suspect. On the other hand, we have the acuity of those who observe – again to a large extent correctly – that the current stagnation is the necessary result of Democratic timidity, of a president and party that has refused to mount any kind of meaningful counterassault on corporately marauding capital in, this, its time of rare weakness; that the blooming of the Right in the wake of what everyone knows was a Right wing implemented disaster is the direct result of what we can see today is the only ideological programme of the Democrats: to reposition elite reason (or liberal-analytical common sense – a.k.a. sanity) in the establishment. Here, we can certainly acknowledge a frustrating obstructionism among some radical Leftists in their refusal to think a clear enough difference between the Democrats in this election and the conservative adminstration just gone. And we should exercise a resistance to this simple equation in which “they serve the same master with different hands”, as it is the kind of folk politics of the intellectual class which leads only to withdrawal, to a depressive vindication of what one already knew, that Capital is the Real of our lives. If Capital is, indeed, the Real of our lives, it isn’t the only Reality, however: that it seems so is exactly how it turns its Real into that ideological miasma Lacan calls, in the lower-case, reality. What the pragmatist impulse knows quite truly is that the less-worse option of the Democrats is actually less-worse, it is not a mere illusion in which nothing is at stake, a point we should not forget, espcially at a moment of new liaison between Tea Party attack squads and the Republican machine. But nor, on the model of the British Empire in World War II, should the lesser evil be configured as the necessary good: a mistake all too easily made by the pragmatists. One of the most sincerely insane things about this election so far has been the mass nostalgia for Clinton, the fact he’s gaining such gushing approbation at rallies and so forth, and will likely save the Democrats a number of seats. How disorientated can the Democrat fanbase possibly be? Apologism for Clinton – the man who oversaw the destruction of their beloved middle ground Left, if it ever actually existed as anything else but the missing moderate Right; who obliterated the further future possibility of ‘social democracy’ when he liquidated the welfare state once and for all (a thing even Reagan-Bush I, try as they might, could not do), remaindering it to the dribs and drabs of the social programs that continue to wheeze on in a perpetual state of apparent near-insolvency – that apologism goes to show the problem of treating a very real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans as anything other than a kind of blackmail. Now, despite all the ethical commandments that insist one should resist blackmail at all costs, that one must always be true to oneself above all, it can sometimes be wiser to accede to blackmail, to be true to oneself in this way, especially when one has no other options at hand for escape bar the self-destruction of allowing the truth to engulf one whole. The demand that we call the bluff of blackmail is always correct from a theoretical perspective but it often acts in practice as though the blackmail did not have real leverage over you. On this count, a vote for even a repugnant ‘Blue Dog’ Democrat may not necessarily be the horrible act of betrayal of values some on the Left may perceive it to be but a quite brave and dedicated thing, precisely for being so compromising. Yet, to take this real difference between the parties and reify it into a committed difference, to convince onself that a political entity which must resort to blackmail, to what Badiou calls ‘the fear of fear’, in order to sustain itself as the ‘progressive’ choice, secretly signals some time-released renaissance in waiting, is nothing other than a betrayal of the very core of one’s Leftist creed. It turns the purpose of acceding to blackmail – to buy time to gain leverage to definitively reject it – into a kind of deluded belief in the blackmailer’s morality, a pitiful syndrome of the abused where one thinks the perpetrator will grow to care about your well-being in time because they’re basically dependent on you. To put it another way: If you vote for the Democrats but do nothing to alter the nature of the vote you’re given, this is only to vote without any reservation for the current conditions, despite the tortuousness of your personal agonies. There is, that is to say, no gap between you and the politics you loathe to shoulder. And is it not this pathology which determines the widespread disenchantment with, and passive-aggressive defence of, the Democrats today? The fact that two years after Obama’s election, which really did signal a new choice, the old choice of no-choice is, as we might have figured, back again? Is it not that our dissatisfaction is due as much to our deep-seated wish that Obama would restore substance to the caretaker role of the Democrats, the sense they’ll look after society, finally, so we could continue, in clear conscience, with our humble lives of private citizenry? As Reid Kane has eloquently pointed out,

“The point Obama made over and over during his campaign is that “change” could not come from him alone, it could only really come from the mass movement that supported him and ultimately voted him into office. His election was only an indication of the power of such a movement, and the effectiveness of his administration would ultimately depend on the extent to which it was supported on the ground by this movement, keeping it in check, demanding more, twisting the arms of congress-people, and of course, organizing for and instituting change in ways that would not wholly depend on government policy.”

Surely, while abjuring this vote for all the right reasons, what we are also abjuring today is our own disgust at this speedy return of our own passivity, our failure to throw off the torpor that prevents us from responding to this part of Obama’s message, including carrying it beyond him. And here, the Right are right when they call (with what seems crazy obliviousness to the political scene) for Obama to ‘come back to the centre ground’. They are essentially calling for Obama to become Clinton, to embrace this new enervation. As are the rallying crowds who look at that old philanderer with such loving fidelity. But the Right are also acknowledging that any actual contemporary Leftism can never be centrist, a thing the Clintonians do not understand. As always, we can learn from our enemies.

That the centre can never be Leftist is a crucial axiom for today, the very baseline of a rhetoric of transformation, of enemy and friend (and the proof that there is, indeed, a powerful reason to keep the imperilled vocabulary, among Leftists, of something so ‘simplistic’ and ‘hostile’ as the dialectic of enemy and friend). To explain why this is so, we must look back to the idea of the vital center and why it is actually the transcedental law that reaches out from the mid-years of the last century to configure the collective mechanism of our political options today. If you take it at its rhetoric, the vital center was a sterling effort to posit a middle Leftism against the radical capitalism of the Right and the apparently inevitable Stalinist endpoint of the Left. Its peculiar affective power lay in its capacity to convince men and women of good progressive will that any Left politics which broke with the democratic settlement of the liberal-capitalist state could only ever end up with the police terror of Stalinism and (later) the ‘socialist greyness’ of the party-state. Moreover, the vital center married its moderation to a sense of historical mission, as it was engaged in a kind of permanent war against irrationalism. Thus, the mandate of the centre Left was to excise the wrecking crew of the Right, as well as the political retards of a Left that wished to alter the state form of democracy itself, to defend capitalist democracy by being first and foremost a political force for adminstrative continuity, for consultation and calibration and improvement and inclusiveness, for the side of all sides.

In this, we have a swarm of confusions and conflations and obfuscations which continue to plague us. And yet perhaps no one has been more pernicuoius and persistent than the idea of the ‘two totalitarianisms’, a framework that continues to distort our politics ever Rightward. Let’s be crystal clear: there was not, and never can be, such a thing as ‘red fascism’, a Nazism of the Left. Whatever the merits of using totalitarianism as a word for the Stalinist event (and, to me, there are few, but this is a topic for a different day’s post), the chronic tendency to compare and contrast Nazi Germany with communist Russia is all about triangulating, between them, a shared spiritual core, to label fascist what was communist and to communize what was fascist. Though an unapologetic Communist, I personally am not of the school that argues that Stalinism had nothing whatsoever to do with the Communist programme – or at least no more or less than I find the American constitution had to do with the historical constitutionality of slavery and the extermination of the natives. Stalinism, however, was nothing like the Left equivalent of Hitler, especially in its moments of closest apparent approximation: overlap formally though it would with a number of Nazi tactics, self-justifications and cynicisms, its atrocity was utterly its own, a singular crime, and not merely, as it has basically come to be understood, the historical correlative and counterpoint to the bad conscience of postwar conservative reaction. Thus, if you have ever wondered why the Right feels it can put a toothpick mustache on Obama without contradiction, you can thank the radical-centrists for this, who, in their ostensibly erudite way, do the same to Marx. Yet, in point of truth, far from the rampant race-aristocratic imperialism of the Nazis, and their deliberate entanglement of peoples in the unabashed chauvinism of class-upon-class (whether racial, economic, sexual, religious, bodily, emotional, intellectual and more), Stalinism was based on the terminal conflation of the communist ideal of classlessess with the police-bureaucratic imposition upon the population of the Party’s insistence that there can be only one class. It has severe lessons, then, yes, but only for the Left: capitalism is inveterately unable to learn anything from the atrocities of Stalinism other than a perpetual narcissistic self-appraisal of the superiority of itself. In this respect, rather than Stalinism operating like Nazism, we might venture that liberal market democracy ties the two totalitarianisms together precisely so as to obfuscate the fact that it is market democracy itself – which, if we’re tainting things with their opposites, is Stalinism’s true opposite, after all- which must be understood as quite superlatively and symmetrically Stalinist, and operating in its inverted spirit. Though not nearly as vivid and direct in its methods, as manifest in a will to slay its opponents (and allies) outright (yet why does it need to? it has the impoverishment and violence of the market itself to do that), market democracy, more so now than ever, also insists – at the barrel of a gun – that there can be only one class. The specific structural parallels remain to be enumerated at greater length, another time, but there is little doubt that Stalinism, alongside the vital center, is another transcedental law of today’s free market world. Hence, the quite accurate sense I believe we all have today (expressed in the political-apathetic certainty that voting wont help us) that we do have a one-party state, despite the very real and ongoing differences between the two parties.

If we follow this line, we can see that the whole point of a radical centrist politics was really to impose upon the Left a new definition of its reason for being. And, like all defintions of being, they work best when they arise not as solution but as a problem: in this case, the problem of how to maintain the status quo but still be Leftist – or, in other words, how to be a Left anti-communist. The Anglophone variant of the answer to that problem was not to answer it, exactly, as much as to insist its opposition to Communism was a hard-won lesson of the open society’s inherent opposition to fascism. For Karl Popper, writing in World War II, the closed society was localized, outward from Plato, in a totalitarian kernel necessary to utopian political thought that could be simultaneously fascist and communist but was always reactionary fundamentally. Insofar then as Popper perceived quite specifically ultraconservative phenomena – master-race domination, aristocracy, eugenic purity, eulogization of dictatorship – to be essential to Plato’s pure political vision, totalitarianism was always already fascist first. However, since Marx’s philosophical pedigree descended in a direct line from Plato as well, so it was, too, that Communism was innately – if not obviously – a fascism, in fact much more so for being so far less crudely and far more abstractly, the truth of which became clear in the swift degeneration that accompanied its ‘pseudo-scientific’ implementation. A fascism, then, evidenced in its dogmatic ‘nonfalsifiability’ (its immunity, that is, to experiential falsification, its absolutist tendency to be able to prove itself right in advance: a point to be followed up in a later post), in its world-historical efforts to re-engineer all particularities in light of a particular historicist purity it dubs ‘universality’ but which, invariably, represents only the determinism of the articulating particularity (also to be followed up at a later point), and above all (and here’s the nub of it) because of its unabashed (and scandalous) opposition to the cardinal idea that liberalism’s open society was really ever open – or open, that is, in any sense that could be said to be definitively opposed to the two far-reaching criticisms above. Of course, it should be added that the effort to apprehend the fundamental genealogy of totalitarianism – as epitomised in Nazism – through what one might call pseudo-philosophical accusations of nonfalsifiability, determinism and eugenic social-engineering, accusations which could be said to unite Nazism and Communism together as symptoms of the same, removes the very mangle of practice, the absence of a law of necessity in history, the failure to account for which Popper had himself found to be the chief poverty in what he dubbed ‘historicism’, or, the ‘pseudo-science’ of non-verifiable transhistorical narratives contained within ideologies of knowledge – though not, of course, that ideology of knowledge self-servingly known as the open society. Forget, then, the contingency of conditions in which its history played out, the role of actually existent materials, structures, forces and agencies, human and non-human: how could Communism ever be anything other than tyrannical? It was written in its stars. And thus, as the libidinal taint of one for another runs, those stars must have basically been swastikas. “The persecution of the Marxists, and of democrats in general,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in a memorandum from 1933, “tends to obscure the fundamental fact that National Socialism is a genuine socialist movement, whose leading ideas are the final fruit of the anti-liberal tendencies which have been steadily gaining ground in Germany since the latter part of the Bismarckian era, and which led the majority of the German intelligentsia first to ‘socialism of the chair’ and later to Marxism in its social-democratic or communist form.” Though hardly counting the hectic pro-capitalism of Hayek amongst its direct intellectual lineage, the centre-left would nonetheless heartily concur with the capitalist theorist’s notion that Nazism and Communism stood in a philosophical alliance precisely because of their (supposedly shared) anti-liberalism. And heavily influenced by liberal-democratic philosophers like Popper, who, incidentally, would himself go on to found, with Friedrich Hayek and others, the neoliberal Mont Pelerin society, the centre-left could proclaim that it stood against all such inevitably Nazi extremisms, in its social defence of liberalism, so that anti-extremism itself could become known as social democracy, and (since the liberal open society is no fan of mass movements) social democracy could itself become a sovereign power administered from above. Unsurprisingly, because largely the point, this was the real death knell of the agitationist, quite communist (though hardly Stalinist) Left that shook America in the 30s: the commitment in the 50s by ‘the Left’ to the Cold War consensus was a new deal about the new deal. In other words, the 50s-60s America of civil participation and respectable geniality we think we need now – the sanity to be restored (the fact it was also the age of segregation, rife gender discrimination, the cradle of runaway military spending, environmental devastation, massive poverty and the restriction of the working classes in all kinds of ways as well – I’m thinking, for instance, of the market-driven nature of what Jennifer Klein has called America’s “public-private welfare state” and the gradual clampdown, which began then, in the form of corporatist deal-making, on union organizational power – all this is forgotten) – the sense of ‘America the Great’ that informs the idea of taking back the nation for politeness now, is actually a misprison of what that great united America truly was: the product of a deeply oppressive and deeply Right-oriented ‘left-liberal centrism’ in which the social-democratic aspects of the past were retained at the price of a refusal to extend the settlement any further (this is the heart, indeed, of ‘the compromise’) than the ongoing recalibration of a series of inherently legitimate private ‘interest groups’. What I will call here a civil Right.

In a weird way, the massive breakthrough of the ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Great Society’ legislation thus witnessed the liberal Left at its most uncommitted and non-ideological. Its defining attack on the structures of exclusion in American life was accompanied by an intense ‘service of wealth’, as the imperative to introduce such legislation, the realist necessity, arose from the argument that the future of capitalism itself depended on what the IMF would later call ‘structural adjustment’. So it is that even as it saw through the most stunning blows against racism, sexism, capitalist pillage and numerous other kinds of discrimination, the social legislation of the 60s also, for instance, shored up the righteousness of the Vietnam War, lowered taxes for the wealthy by some 20% (the beginning of the anti-tax victories), imposed draconian legislation upon youth crimes (the beginning of the current segregation of an African-American prison population and the new Jim Crow; the beginning of exorbitant ‘civil’ police powers against protestors, the other ‘civil rights’ enacted by that legislation), oversaw the concentration of authority to abolish tariffs in the office of the presidency (hence Reagan’s breezy ability to devastate entire industrial sectors overnight) and marked the refusal to endorse free universal health care (the flagship program of communist states and the one which, to this day, stands as a true accomplishment of those states), instead turning medical treatment into a welfare benefit (Medicaid: specifically for those on benefits and the elderly) rather than a right, a fateful decision which continues, even now, to determine that peculiar American madness in which providing healthcare to all, (theoretically) irregardless of class or wealth, is not considered a sine qua non of the democratic social contract. Obviously, my point here is not to recast the ‘Great Society’ legislation as some kind of nefarious moment in American politics – it was a true achievement – but to ask us to attend to its contradictions. For notice how sentimentalized it is by the very Democrats who, today, stoically and willfully destroy its every last vestige, who see in LBJ a sort of tragic Attic allegory for how unappreciated one’s efforts become to make the world a better place when fighting for what little one can in the face of ‘political reality’. In this respect, when Americans currently feel that ‘government is the problem’, a sentiment the Right cranks up to a sort of zealous bastardry, and are made to believe the Great Society was a great failure, they’re not deluded or miseducated as such, they’re actually quite correct in a way – except the Right has substituted a conservative keyword – “Government” – for what used to be a Leftist mode of attack on the state and turned “the sixties” into a failure of direction rather than the product of a grand refusal to go far along enough. As such, for the unashamedly anti-capitalist Left, the state was (and is) absolutely the problem, while it was (and is) almost never so for the liberal-left, which relies on the state itself as the fundament of its class position. It is this class character that is exactly what defines the liberal-left as the civil Right. And, in this precise sense, the neoliberal-oriented debate over whether the market is the answer to government, or government is the solution to the market, deliberately misses the real anti-capitalist point: it is the market-state that is the problem and so nothing less than a whole new political process that democratizes the nexus between political economy and the market-state is what needs to be inaugurated.

This is really what the effort to take back the Democratic Party for the Left in the 70s was all about: with the evidence and momentum of the civil rights movement at hand, the protest movement saw that the Great Society, the apotheosis of radical centrism, was anything but the crushing legislative abolition of inequality it proclaimed itself to be – and, seeing this, they continued on. Hence, when Martin Luther King Jr was shot in Tennessee, it was well in the wake of the Great Society legislation, at a rally for black sanitary workers seeking better pay and conditions. Ditto Malcolm X and of course Robert Kennedy, whose lifestory is probably the greatest illustrative example of a reformed and penitent liberal Leftist, a man who prosecuted and persecuted Communists in the 50s, who chorused Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, and who later stood on television, in areas of terrible poverty that continued to exist and said, firmly, that the Vietnam War must end immediately and that the Great Society was not nearly enough. The late 60s and early 70s ended the conservative consensus of Cold War anti-communism, the brainchild of the vital center that had put radical experimental politics into deep freeze. It looked to put an end to the hegemony of the American civil Right, to which the civil rights movement discovered it was inherently opposed. But, as we know, it failed before it really got going. As did many other similar revolutionary convulsions across the world at that time: May ’68, the revolutionary character of certain Third World movements like Ethiopia’s removal of its monarchy or the energies behind and aspects of the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan, the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the initial stages of the Iranian revolution, and, last but not least, the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

It’s that point we need to pick up from today, looking toward the future. The Left is mistaken to think the problems only began with the advent of Reagan’s inauguration: “Morning in America” is precisely so ideological because it declares itself so categorically as a horizon of thought – even to its enemies. The neoliberal breakthrough occurred in the wake of a widespread realisation of how insufficient and malaise-ridden was Jimmy Carter’s attempt to restore the consensus politics of the Cold War middle. And surely, if assuming the qualities of any of the prior Presidents, Obama right now resembles Carter, a resemblance which accords with the growing sense of disenchantment and directionlessness across the country, the seemingly relentless rise of the Right (since nothing organized further to the Left exists to take it on as an alternative) and the growing feeling this deserves to be a one-term presidency. But, what’s more, Obama risks being like Carter in worse conditions, seeing as Carter tried to restore the wretched middle in the wake of a massive Left-wing convulsion. Today the middle is proposed to be restored in the wake of a runaway Right wing reaction that has run out of obvious alibis. Make no mistake: this is a time where, if we let it go by, we miss a moment in which it is really possible again for the Left to be Left, rather than reduced to carrying on in the distorted, conformist, beaten down version of itself, exhausted and at an episodal close, that came about at the end of the 70s. For this very reason, it is crucial to realize that Obama is not just another Carter. To think so falls into a disconcertedly common mistake the intellectual Left makes, insofar as it is loathe to consider Obama and radicalism together in any way whatsoever, at the risk of appearing hopelessly deluded. There is little doubt that Obama is not an updated FDR come along to remake capital’s crisis in social democracy’s shiny new image. His has always been the bourgeois imagination of moral uplift, not the proletarian vision of social levelling. We saw at last what a catastrophe this intrinsically conservative instinct of his is in his muted and altogether useless reaction to the murky horror of the Gulf oil spill. If any moment will be looked back upon as the stepping out of the Obama Jimmy Carter, it was this event. He did not move forward to proclaim a new American anti-capitalism at that defining instant: instead, he brokered and dallied and cleaned up behind the scenes: pure paralysed administrationism, in other words. Still, for all the undeniable truth of this meteoric rise to mediocrity, let’s focus on what Obama, in his first phase, did manage, if just barely: the health care reforms. As paltry as they are in nearly all key respects, as disaster-prone as they were in execution, the health care measures nevertheless mark the first genuine social legislation to impact the country in years. That breakthrough is a breakthrough – hence the Right’s desperate gasping squeals for ‘Repeal!’ – and should be acknowledged as such – acknowledged, that is, alongside the fact that it is also simultaneously this selfsame legislation that means a captive market and megamillions for the insurance monopolies, and which, moreover, in what we must always remember is its fundamental obscenity, allows them to live on to ply their extortionist trade through the bodies of the sick and needy. The health bill is a breakthrough, however, precisely because it entails a mandatory extension of social rights, in the form of coverage pools, from which there is no automatic means to opt out. While this mandatory expansion is, of course, designed above all to offset the costs of coverage for insurers, not to ensure equity of access and cost for patients, the subsidisation and enforcement of health care marks a pivot toward the social insofar, as the bellowing Right-wing knowingly insists, the bill is, indeed, intrinsically ‘anti-choice’, or, in other words, subject to the ideal (if not the true practice) of a universal safety net American neoliberalism had worked long and hard to disallow. Moreover, the reforms are a breakthrough in that people by a clear margin want the bill, despite all its scary ‘compulsion’ – which is to say, its shallow but clear turn toward the universal mandate of the social – even as, because totally disorientated by economic crisis, and yearning for a shred of surety, they are unfavourable toward the byzantine complexity of the bill (and not wrongly) while being wooed by the Republican snake-oil sales brigade that argue reform to the reform can only be achieved through ‘repeal’. Thus, as the very existence of this epic resistance shows, although it willingly pledges itself to the maintenance of obscene market exploitation, the reason the health care law nonetheless feels like something, like a true glimmer of difference, is precisely because it has also become a defining symbolic strike against the stricken neoliberal settlement. In other words, its most bizarre reality is that the undeniable weakness of its blow has given way to its experience as nothing but a blow, a fundamental humiliation to free-marketeers, a sharp slap in their face – meaning, in other words, that its progressive ideological impact is not at all illusory. ‘ObamaCare’ serves as such an intensely traumatic red flag for the Right, a source of such vast and specific anger, because it effectively declares (and much more than the bailouts, really, which are still open to being lied away as ‘a crisis beyond our control’, met with an emergency measure) that the neoliberal years are over, despite the fact they are everywhere still rotting away with us. The bill, therefore, not in spite of but because of its cravenness and cowardliness, its two-way bet on both money and reform, signals a crucial loss of credibility, a vote of no confidence, in the wisdom and regenerability of the system of capital that has been steadily perfected by both parties over the last thirty years.

And let’s not be overly cautious or coy: neoliberalism is most certainly dead. But that death does not mean the death of the rampant plutocracy that was neoliberalism’s essence. In fact, what’s most disturbing, I think now we’re seeing that essence unleashed. Notice, for instance, that the only condition under which the health care bill could graduate to even the possibility of passing (and here, too, it was a pitched battle all the way) was through erasing the so-called ‘public option’, which could not even be allowed through under the temperate capitalist rubric of a ‘choice’, an option. The social dimension of the bill, then, while it is there and does exist, is legislated only in terms of private rights for (theoretically, not actually) everyone, a framework which must be understood as a key frailty in terms of their impact, effectiveness and legislative future. Of course, as one might reasonably point out, had the Left Democrats insisted on their public option, we’d have had no breakthrough at all. But the trouble is that this bitter reckoning – that it is, indeed, bitter – has not been (and apparently cannot be) registered by the majority of the Democrats – and certainly none in positions of critical influence – as any kind of loss to themselves. This perpetual, readymade philosophical willingness to bid adieu to the public is exactly why liberal-Leftism is in no way fit to defeat the fixated war mentality of post-neoliberal capitalism, even if it really wanted to. Though hardly restrained by the neoliberal settlement, capital had to abide by certain formal procedures that have today been deemed, by dint of economic emergency, irrelevant. This unleashed plutocracy is very much a test of whether America is, in fact, to continue on as a democracy of any kind, even a sickly capitalist-representative one, or whether it is to become the next openly market Stalinist nation. All countries under neoliberalism have been subject to heavy degrees of market Stalinism but it’s only now that we’re seeing the real spirit of that assault come into the open as a doctrine all of its own: for instance, in Britain, where the Tories are proceeding with their liquidation of the remainders of the social state despite the fact such cuts in spending and demand risk being deleterious for the economy – a fact even neoliberal economists verify. Unless it reorientates toward an alternative to the market-state itself, then, the upcoming devil’s bargain for the Left will be to find itself drawn increasingly into a new wedge: one where rehabiltating capitalist representative democracy, or ‘restoring sanity and/or fear’ interchangeably (for that is what the schizophrenia of capitalist democracy inherently entails) is its only available mission, a struggle that can only herald a further cave-in to a capitalism so situationally secure it now modulates between two forms of victory: a folkish authoritarian lockdown class plunder at all costs, or a liberal contractual elite exploitationism which makes stagnant incrementalism entirely synonymous with the social.

When Stalin introduced his Stalin Constitution in 1936, it included the first general, open and secret ballot for election to the Supreme Soviet. It was a moment, in other words, where Stalin’s power was so supremely insulated that his re-election to office was able to be placed genuinely in the hands of the Supreme Soviet’s electors. The aim in this was not just the execution of a kind of consummate propagandistic pageantry, to validate the legitimacy of the leader, but to achieve a bastardization of the secret will – without closing out the electoral authenticity – that characterises the genuineness of autonomy itself. Here is how Pravda reported the results:

“Midnight has struck. The twelfth of December, the day of the first general, equal and direct elections to the Supreme Soviet, has ended. The result of the voting is about to be announced.
The commission remains alone in its room. It is quiet, and the lamps are shining solemnly. Amid the general attentive and intense expectation the chairman performs all the necessary formalities before counting of the ballots – checking up by list how many voters there were and how many have voted – and the result is 100 per cent. 100 per cent! What election in what country for what candidate has given a 100 per cent response?
The main business starts now. Excitedly the chairman inspects the seals on the boxes. Then the members of the commission inspect them. The seals are intact and are cut off. The boxes are opened.
It is quiet. They sit attentively and seriously, these election inspectors and executives.
Now it is time to open the envelopes. Three members of the commission take scissors. The chairman rises. The tellers have their copybooks ready. The first envelope is slit. All eyes are directed to it. The chairman takes out two slips – white [for a candidate for the Soviet of the Union] and blue [for a candidate for the Soviet of Nationalities] – and reads loudly and distinctly, ‘Comrade Stalin.’
Instantly the solemnity is broken. Everybody in the room jumps up and applauds joyously and stormily for the first ballot of the first general secret election under the Stalinist Constitution – a ballot with the name of the Constitution’s creator.”

Today, are we not faced, with growing regularity, by ballots that bear “the name of the Constitution’s creator”? Is not the general secrecy of our vote fundamentally negated by the openness of what can only be elected? On this count, we also find in the Stalin Constitution the notorious Article 12: “In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’” Capital’s democracy gives the Left two choices: we can learn to be hunger artists, as civil Right-liberalism insists, or we can choose to starve, as the radical Right insists. A true Left says no, we have another option, a public option, a very uncivil option. We can eat the rich.