salvage perspectives 4 – february 2017 order prevails in washington

1 Not since 1943 has there been a better strategy, taking 1917 as our playbook, time to be a fascist. The ‘liberal order’, or 1968, or 2003. the demise of which has been the Not that this is, though they are subject of ruling-class hot takes for preparing to instrumentalise it, quite some years now, does indeed appear the world the ruling classes had in to be in a shabby state. Trump’s mind, as the narratives extruded by election – on which more within this their various clercs show. According issue – follows on from the vote for to them what we witness is something Brexit as a body blow to the politics of called ‘populism’, which, as Nick Cohen the ‘extreme centre’ in the very lands and the Economist and the Washington in which it was born. Victory for the Post and endless such others would far-right Freedom party in Austria’s have it, ‘explains’ both Jeremy Corbyn presidential election was very narrowly and Donald Trump, the Brexit and Oxi averted: should Marine Le Pen win votes, Podemos and Golden Dawn. the forthcoming French presidential Thus the racist and the committed anti- contest, against which no sensible racist, the billionaire and the socialist, punter would now bet, the resulting are lumped together. scrap of hard-won relief will evaporate. In part this narrative reflects how, Then the UN security council will be from the perspective of the Washington led by the fascist- through hard-right of Consensus, Corbyn and Trump US, French and British politics, plus the merely look like different types of distinct market-Stalinisms of Vladimir doom – though Trump, once dubbed Putin and Xi Jinping. In the second rank ‘Voldemort’ by the IMF, is of course will be the hard-right Narendra Modi now making his peace with the reign of of India, and the Brazilian inheritors the finance capital to which he referred of a soft coup for austerity. This is not with barely veiled antisemitism during a world in which it is growing easier his campaign. But the ideological for workers to organise economic move around ‘populism’ is also a self-defence, or develop political displacement, a refusal to acknowledge organisations to achieve class demands. how the ascent of Trump was greased Salvage has always enjoyed its by the very political centre now eager schadenfreude at the expense of the to perform its willingness to ‘give him a liberal commentariat, but the historical chance’ (and how pleasantly surprised crisis now unfolding is too grave for the centre’s representatives have been cacchination. Since our foundation, by their cordial and productive recent we’ve argued that the right is currently meetings with the President-elect). better poised to build in the world Without the ‘war on terror’ and its ushered in by the economic crisis of Islamophobic soundtrack, no Trump. a decade past: that most hopes that it Without the crescendo of neoliberal would prove fertile territory for the Left financialisation, its denouement in the were nourished by nostalgia passing for credit crunch, and the redoubling of

2 its social sadism and jubilant dancing the machine his own, incompetence, on the graves of the system’s losers, incoherence and paralysis may offer a no Trump. A key task for the Left is to respite from some of Trump’s policies relentlessly lay bare this genealogy. – but they’re just as likely to exacerbate others. Nor is he without ideological-  organisational support from the hard right of the Republicans, already more akin to a European far-right formation The Trumpocene than the increasingly befuddled In the disavowal of the lineage is no technocrats of the neoliberal centre. small measure of paternalism: witness At its edge, of course, this base David Runciman writing in the London shades into the mercantilists and white Review of Books that voters have thrown supremacists of the so-called ‘alt-right’. a ‘tantrum’ to which ‘the likeliest A glance at Trump’s cabinet should response is for the grown-ups in the freeze the blood: much has been written room to hunker down, waiting for about Steve Bannon, the pound-shop the storm to pass’. And some storms Streicher elevated to chief of staff. Less do pass: perhaps the most tempting boisterous but even more dangerous response to the crisis is to believe are Trump’s appointments to offices that not that much has changed, that that cascade influence down through nothing fundamental is really going on, the state: Klan-curious Jeff Sessions as that it won’t be that bad. As a strategy attorney general; John Bolton – a man for getting to sleep at night, this is who never met a Middle Eastern state understandable: as a political diagnosis, he didn’t want to bomb – as (at the time it’s worse than useless. of writing) potential secretary of state. It’s true that Trump will be hedged One terrifying appointment is at around by the stability-valuing the Environmental Protection Agency: institutions of the US state. Part of the Scott Pruitt is a climate-change denier, horror with which the new President reflecting Trump’s insistence – sincere is regarded inside the Beltway is that, or not – that climate science is a Chinese unpredictable, inappropriate and hoax to hobble US growth. Trump untrained, he demeans the office of proposes to make America great again commander-in-chief amongst those by making America sink again. As for whom no number of dead Arabs or Arctic ice reaches its lowest-ever level, Guatemalans could do the same. As one its waters warm enough to bathe in, and liberal internationalist put it to a Salvage atmospheric CO2 levels not seen in our editor: ‘I’ve lost my moral authority!’ species’ lifespan, climate-change denial The bruised-but-dignified US state returns to power in the world’s largest apparatus and establishment will economy. restrain Trump barely, if at all. Without Standing Rock protesters succeeded a loyal party organisation to make in temporarily blocking the Dakota

3 Access oil pipeline from passing ‘populism’ and the ‘nutter’ Corbyn, through Native American tribal lands, and reinvent the centre. Joining the but the pipeline will be built, and conga-line of vapid ‘populism’-bashers, Trump – who has personal investments he says: ‘The right attacks immigrants in the corporations building it, political while the left rails at bankers, but … contributions from the same, and a the addiction to simple, demagogic close class alliance with the energy answers to complex problems are the sector redolent of the Bush era – same for both extremes.’ Blair is betting plans to ‘cut the red tape’ which is on the idea that there is a vacuum at the obstructing further oil exploitation. centre of politics today: how right he is. The Paris Agreement, coming into And of that vacuum he is the epitome. force days before Trump’s election, is pitiful, non-binding, inadequate and  almost certainly too late: its function was ideological, self-congratulation and evasion for the ruling classes. Even After Truth this minimal decorous veil, though, The nostrum Blair expresses so clearly was too much for Trump’s death drive, – that the centre and those used to and he has promised US withdrawal. governing in its name have a privileged Increasingly agitated scientists debate relationship to truth and complexity – whether the window of possibility to is encapsulated in the smug meme of prevent runaway, socially cataclysmic ‘post-truth politics’. warming has closed: Trump promises For this supposedly new state of to seal it shut. affairs the traditional media is clear that On this, as on almost all issues – of course – their newer competitors where he has a clear policy, Trump is are to blame. That social media has very much the greater evil. This is not created bubbles of the like-minded, in contention. The claim is not that the feeding each other fake news stories, new authoritarian right are equivalent neither knowing about nor caring to the neoliberal centre. They’re worse. for the opinions of others, nor for And/but it is those who have been in the veracity of their own. That such charge who brought us to this pass – for an electorate will reward a man who which they display neither reflection brags about sexual assault, making nor responsibility. Instead, they drone, him pussy-grabber-in-chief. And that a ‘new centre’ must be founded – the solution to this problem is mutual presumably so it can repeat the failures understanding, a search for common of the old one. ground. Let the Millennial lie down Tony Blair, who earlier declared with the Daily Mail reader, and the tears himself baffled by the new political shall be wiped from their eyes. conjuncture, has declared his Twitter and Facebook are, certainly, ‘comeback’, the better to fight unconscionable. They are, however, no

4 more responsible for Trump, Brexit and newspaper, becoming hegemonic, Le Pen than they were for the Egyptian a default common sense. It was also revolution. Implied in the formulation utterly false. In the wake of that ‘post-truth politics’ is that what went on falsehood has ensued the wrecking of before it was the truth, and nothing but what remains of the welfare state, a the truth. deterioration in living standards the Let’s humour this idea, and ask, Institute for Fiscal Studies describes then, when did such politics begin? as ‘the worst since the last war’, and At what point did xenophobia and a geographically mediated decline misdirected rage become the common responsible in no small part for the currency of politics? Brexit vote. Yet those who propagated, 28 July 2002? Thanks to the Chilcot abetted and (in the case of the Liberal Report, we know that to be the day Democrats) added to the big lie now Tony Blair assured George W. Bush present themselves as the guardians of that he would be ‘with you whatever’ in reasonable, fact-based policy. the invasion of Iraq – just as the British In the search for the source public was being assured that it was not of toxic political xenophobia and inevitable that their government would authoritarianism, why not revisit join the US invasion, and that every September 2007, when Gordon Brown effort was being made to find Saddam introduced the demand for ‘British jobs Hussein’s (non-existent) arsenal of for British workers’? Those of us who weapons of mass destruction under UN fought against this slogan warned that auspices. Where is the accountability it would pollute working-class politics for the lie, and the incalculable pain for years to come: if only we had been that followed in its wake? The man wrong. Anyone wondering where responsible still walks free, with the ‘populist’ disregard for democracy effrontery to lecture others on their comes from would also do well to look extremism. to the post-crisis governance of Italy If that seems too early, how about and Greece – the former subject to the the UK election of 2010? To justify its direct and unelected rule of finance austerity program, the Conservatives in November 2011, the latter’s far-left insisted that ‘Labour wrecked the experiment under Syriza crushed by economy’ by increasing public a European extreme centre that held spending, living beyond the country’s that ‘against the treaties there can be no means, and inflating public debt to an democracy’. unmanageable size. This narrative, How long did people expect all of with its poisonous demonisation this to continue, without something of ‘skivers’, public-sector workers, going seriously wrong? the unemployed and the disabled, Yet still the anti-populist would-be was repeated monotonously on the populists of the hard centre persist in national broadcaster and in every major their catechisms. Fillon, who promises

5 a dose of the Thatcherite medicine by allowing large employers to hire France has supposedly been lacking, people on less secure contracts. As likely to be the main opponent of Le unemployment rose and his party’s Pen, has already signalled his racist traditional supporters abandoned bona fides, by refusing to evince a shred him, Renzi boasted about a tepid 1 of ‘repentance’ for France’s colonial per cent growth rate. He secured the past, and announcing a renewed backing of the European Union and countersubversive thrust against the threatened that if the reforms were not ‘radical Islam’ he claims is ‘corrupting’ voted through, he would resign his French Muslims. The Socialist Party’s post, implicitly opening the possibility candidate will probably be Manuel of a new election and a populist right Valls, a pale imitation of the same, a man government. who derides nostalgia for the trentes Neoliberal authoritarianism was glorieuses of social democracy. His rejected by 60 to 40 per cent. With an austerian politics are given their own aura of martyrdom typical of centre- racist-populist gloss by his obnoxious left politicians shredding their own role in the Islamophobic crackdowns of credibility in this era, Renzi sniffed, ‘we recent years, making him a half-hearted tried to give Italy a chance to change, opponent of Le Pen on this issue. If but we didn’t make it’. these comprise the frontline against fascism, the future is grim.  An absurd climacteric of neoliberal anti-populist populism was recently reached in Italy when Matteo Renzi, Right-Populism and Capital the unelected Prime Minister, tried Is the loyalty of the centre to capitalism to blackmail voters into voting for a reciprocated? The overwhelming programme of constitutional changes alignment of industrial and financial that would reduce democratic checks, corporations behind Hillary Clinton remove powers from the senate and would suggest so. Trump won as local government, and allow him a politician of the insurgent right, to push through a fresh wave of threatening not only to jail his electoral austerian reform. This was pitched opponent, but also to take down the as a modernisation project, a blow ‘global elite’ he claimed – with one of against corruption, a purge of useless those unsubtle nods to the antisemitic politicians, and a re-tooling of state right – were keeping down American capacity. Renzi proposed the changes workers. following his unpopular labour-market But already there are signs that reforms, which, eroding working business is warming to its supposed conditions more than even Berlusconi Nemesis. Upon his election, stock succeeded in doing, were justified markets were sanguine, and as of as heralding a new wave of growth writing, they remain so. ‘Wall Street hits

6 records’, the Financial Times reported, domination. If its early supersession ‘as Trump optimism continues’. Why? of alternative energy sources was To a degree, Trump has set imbricated with the defeat of the out to neutralise the opposition of British working class in the 1850s, the capital. Anti-Wall Street rhetoric suppression of alternative energy and notwithstanding, Trump’s pick for the conservation of the fuel deathlock Treasury Secretary is Steven Mnuchin, economy today is about reversing the formerly of Goldman Sachs. (The other rise of ‘new economy’ capitalist sectors. GS alumnus in his team is the notorious Tax cuts and public-private Bannon.) To chair his economy forum alliances will be used to attempt to he appointed Blackstone CEO Steve stimulate private-sector investment. Schwarzman, who is now dropping Trump will also invest heavily in the broad hints that Trump will conduct military-industrial complex, as have a bonfire of regulations and taxes. previous Republican administrations, Notwithstanding his still nebulous as a form of backhanded Keynesianism: plan to cut drug prices, the tax cuts indeed, during his campaign he he promises to pharmaceuticals – in spouted recommendations for the interests of encouraging them to Pentagon-augmentation from the ‘repatriate’ their wealth – they expect Heritage Foundation, that could add to produce a surge in profits. On $900 billion to the Defense budget trade, Trump still talks a bullish game over the coming decade. Many of his on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but appointees are drawn from the military has indicated that he will not scrap or defence contractors, suggesting a NAFTA, despite campaign claims to the privileged political relationship to the contrary. manufacturers of death. This will be The high value of shares is also the first stimulus programme carried related to Trump’s $500 billion stimulus out by the US government outside of proposal to upgrade the US’s antiquated a recession for over five decades. And infrastructure, which even the OECD it will be, as Bernie Sanders put it, anticipates will raise US growth rates ‘corporate welfare, coming and going’. by one percentage point. This will This doesn’t mean the US capitalist favour privileged corporations and class is rallying behind Trump: it’s industrial sectors, particularly energy rallying behind the best deal it can and construction, key components of get from a situation it didn’t choose. Bush’s capitalist base. A right-populist stimulus plan is, Trump’s support for the carbon- unsurprisingly, better for business based economy has specific class than a left-populist one – but it’s still a valences. As Andreas Malm has shown, serious risk, especially given the team the dominance of that economy has expected to implement it. been determined to a substantial extent Worse for business is that losses by the exigencies of political class arising from Trump’s withdrawal from

7 the Trans-Pacific Partnership – a retreat capitalist class over how much room to conducted on the fantastical basis that give him, and indeed the divisions that the US has enriched an Asian middle are now opening up within the US state class by impoverishing American itself – with local sites of state power, workers – are potentially vast. The from mayor’s offices to state capitals, setback to the American empire, even and even the LAPD, lining up to oppose if Trump makes up for it with more him on policies such as his plan for violence, would not just be calculable deportations – might afford militant in narrow economic terms. The purpose protest a cleavage on which to operate, of the TPP, as The Economist put it, was an opportunity for leverage. to allow the United States to ‘shape the Of course, any such leverage will architecture of international trade in have to be fought for, unremittingly. Asia and beyond’ for the foreseeable Trump could be a two-term future. It would have rolled out a new calamity: there is also the chance that ‘trade’ regime bolstering intellectual- he could be the weakest president in property rights restricting state support United States history. for publicly owned companies. Aside from creating streams of profit for ‘new  economy’ corporations, the techbros and Silicon Valley capitalists who lined up behind Clinton, this would On the Whitelash have afforded the United States a new Accompanying the aristocratic degree of political penetration into liberalism of the commentariat rival capitalist states, and stamped have been confused and truculent its authority in the coming waves of engagements with the politics of globalisation. identity, typically oscillating between Trump’s first victims in all this, two bad iterations. In one, gains made populist sops notwithstanding, will by women, people of colour, migrants be the working class. Like Modi, he and so on, have been at the expense of, represents himself as a tough, business- an affront to, an entity known as the minded fixer who can get things ‘white working class’, which has now done. Unions, strikers, labour and lashed out in anger. The Clintonite environmental regulations, protesters, liberal Mark Lilla expressed a soft will be lined up as such obstacles. version of this, explaining to New York What his opponents may have on Times readers that ‘identity politics’ their – our – side is a certain strategic – by which phrase he invoked overly opening that would not be present clamorous and hasty claims for justice in the case of a more establishment- on the parts of women, gays and ethnic mandated candidate: the relative minorities – had destroyed a broad weakness of capitalist support for progressive coalition that Bill Clinton Trump. This, the divisions in the assembled during the 1990s. (This claim

8 was in part linked to Democratic Party to racial, sexual and gender equality, to internal politics, as the old guard fought the relative decline of the affluent white hard to keep the mildly progressive male, long in the making and long past Muslim Keith Ellison from its chair.) In time. the other version of the argument, the To achieve anything, it is an urgent victories of Trump, Brexit and so on are priority for the Left to think clearly reasons to be very disappointed in this about its relationship to whiteness, ‘white working class’. Any economic the working class, and to resisting programme that might alleviate the allure of that glittering generality, working-class suffering, therefore, is the ‘white working class’, dangled considered akin to a concession to white before it on both sides of the Atlantic. supremacy and/or misogyny. Anyone on the Left who believes that The shared assumption of these two Trump embodies a legitimate protest specious arguments is that there is a against the neoliberal status quo will cohesive, corporative entity, ‘the white likely try to placate and mollify his working class’; and, following from supporters, thus neutralising their that, that it is racist, and that it has a own militancy. The unconscious true material interest in racism. Either assumption of such discourse is that way, this white working class should the working class, the real working get what they deserve: more racism, or class, is white – notwithstanding the more poverty. multiracial working class that has been To dispute these claims should not mobilised in Black Lives Matter, at be to minimise the scale or traction Standing Rock, behind $15 per hour, of white supremacy or misogyny. and during the Chicago Teachers’ Salvage insists, rather, that while there Strike. On the other hand, those who are workers who are white, whiteness believe – as was argued in The Nation – does not mean the same thing in, say, a that Trump’s victory showed that ‘the Pennsylvania mining community as in preservation of white supremacy’ was Fifth Avenue. Whiteness does different the ‘paramount interest’ of ‘particularly work for different groups, including working-class white people’, are likely different groups of workers, most of to be at best narrowly and ineffectually whom, far from choosing between militant. At worst, they are likely to Trump and Clinton, simply did not be vulgar apologists for Clinton, who vote. While Trump ‘flipped’ some key can conceive of no reason other than groups of white workers, the majority bigotry why any working stiff wouldn’t of his support came from the traditional throw her a vote. Republican base, at the core of which A more detailed consideration of is the affluent – though increasingly the parameters of Trump’s ascension, insecure – new middle class. Their and the ruinous and unconscionable reaction to ‘identity politics’ is an behaviour of the Democratic Party, opposition to the slightest concession and its part in that victory, follows,

9 in our essay ‘Saturn Devours His In the context of the ‘war on terror’, Young: President Trump’. Here, Islamophobia became the quilting point we stress that the majority of white of a new global far right, taking its cue workers didn’t vote for Trump – or from United States empire ideologues at all – and that Trump capitalised like Robert Spencer, Debbie Schlussel, on the breakdown of the inherited Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes and modes of political management in Glenn Beck. The Front National, the first instance by appealing to the Vlaams Belang, the Swiss People’s disproportionately affluent and even Party, Pegida, the English Defence college-educated Republican base. League, the Dutch Freedom Party and That there is a ‘whitelash’ in the Trump Anders Breivik adopted as their chief vote, therefore, most not be confused point of reference the homogenous, with the idea that there is any kind of monolithic and menacing figure of uniform ‘white working class’ backlash. The Muslim. The British writer Bat And the ‘whitelash’, visible already Ye’Or’s ‘Eurabia’ thesis, according in the terrified suburbanites of 2008 to which European authorities had warning, amid economic sturm und formed a corrupt alliance with the Arab drang, that Barack Hussein Obama is an world, became the basis for polemics occult Muslim, has congealed around about ‘Londonistan’ – a contemporary an issue on which the Democrats do not operating equivalent of the antisemitic have remotely clean hands. trope of ‘Jew York’ – claiming that this outpost of ‘Western civilisation’ was  being taken over by Islam. Liberal intellectuals played their part in this, often vaunting a ‘new The Eternal Muslim atheism’ as the martial creed of the Now that Trump has won, it seems, he age. Sam Harris was not untypical in is willing to row back from some of the saying that ‘“Muslim extremism” is not more deranged policies he promised extreme among Muslims’, that Islamic his base. The Muslim registry, we have doctrine is to ‘convert, subjugate, or been informed, was never a proposal. kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and We misunderstood: Trump only ever conquer the world’, and that those wanted to improve existing surveillance ‘who speak most sensibly about the practices – which are both extensive threat that Islam poses to Europe are and extending. Thus Trump aimed actually fascists’. Martin Amis and and aims to situate himself within a Christopher Hitchens gave vent to the mainstream, acceptable spectrum of ‘demographic threat’ posed to Europe Islamophobia, just as previously he by Islam. Feminist Joan Smith and justified his deportations policy by social-democratic author Will Hutton pointing out (correctly) that Obama had each claimed that the appearance of deported record numbers of migrants. symbols of Islam like the ‘veil’, or the

10 construction of new mosques, owed they should all be registered – was not their energies to the same source a wild stretch. that produced suicide attackers and For the moment, Trump is prepared threatened civilisation. Above all, Tony to settle for electronic monitoring of Blair fuelled the Islamophobia lobby by everyone on the FBI’s ‘terrorist watch blaming acts of political terror on the list’, but should he wish to go further, ‘evil within’ the Muslim community. he inherits a grand, labyrinthine In the US, the Islamophobia network of executive powers. He has industry was mostly aligned behind been gifted the ability to imprison Bush, but it had no shortage of outposts people indefinitely without charge, in the Democratic Party establishment: assassinate American citizens without one of Hillary Clinton’s strongest due process (it goes without saying supporters in the 2008 primary and that non-citizens are murdered by again in 2016, for example, was General Joint Special Operations Command Wesley Clark, who has called for a on the say-so of the president’s kill revival of World War II-style internment list) and increased surveillance. All camps for ‘disloyal Americans’, above these instruments of oppression and all ‘radical Muslims’. These chickens more were consolidated by the man came home to roost when, during the the cringe-inducing sanctification cult 2008 presidential election, Obsession, of whom among liberals proceeds at the anti-Muslim propaganda film, was breakneck pace – Obama. distributed in key battleground states as a companion to the Islamophobic  baiting of Obama. Undeterred, Hillary Clinton’s election campaign articulated a muted Solidarity, Graffiti and Rubble version of Trump’s countersubversive It is shamefully the case that some on the ideology when she argued that ‘[w]e Left have participated in the bellicose need American Muslims to be part of counter-jihadist strains of Islamophobia our eyes and ears on our front lines.’ as an outgrowth of their support for As though Muslim-Americans are President Assad of Syria. The crushing intrinsically knowledgeable about, of the Arab uprisings triggered in 2011 and responsible for, those organising – a brutal nadir of which has been jihadist confrontations with the reached with the fall of Aleppo, after American empire. ‘Good Muslims’ barrel-bombing, chlorine poisoning, the tell on their bad neighbours, and ‘bad destruction of all hospitals and civilian Muslims’ are the ones surveilled. infrastructure, with Putin’s bombers Trump’s extrapolation from doing much of the work – is a tragedy this securitarian logic – to say that for the international Left. since good and bad Muslims were The ‘goodbye’ videos posted by increasingly impossible to tell apart activists and citizens are not merely

11 a testament to that tragedy: they Assad’s, are freed. The mainstream are a lesson. Their spirit is echoed Syrian opposition meanwhile has, in the graffiti of another besieged according to the Washington Post, and defeated Syrian city, Homs: offered to ‘work with Trump and ‘Remember, when we were still human? Russia’. As if there would be anything Do you remember, Homs?’ These with which to work. This follows from are people who threw off, however a long, and failed, opposition strategy temporarily and imperfectly, the rule of seeking alliances with states such as of a neoliberal tyranny by their own Turkey only to learn that these have no collective agency, and preserved the permanent allies, only interests. A hard memory of that uprising in the rubble lesson is being taught here, one that will of their homes. Who imagines that any no doubt soon be visited on the PYD: future revolutionaries will find more solidarity against rulers, not with them, favourable conditions or less savage is the surest strategy. counter-revolution? A Left that slanders In the midst of the assault on and ignores such people, simply Aleppo, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm – one of the because the regime against which they towering Syrian Marxist intellectuals revolted was not a pro-American one, of whom Western Leftists work hard is refusing to learn the lessons of this to be ignorant – died in Berlin. Al-Azm epoch, the epoch of collapse, rather said in an interview two years into the than that of circa-2003 ‘regime change’. uprising, ‘in its revolution today, Syria It is common, on the anti-anti-Assad spills this much blood in order to atone Left, to hold Turkey and other outside for all its past sins and erase its shame, powers responsible for the destruction and for this reason, I am with it’. How wreaked on Syria. Salvage holds no brief much greater the tally will be now, and for the authoritarian thug Erdoğan. Yet how much worse the reckoning. the road to the destruction of Aleppo Yet there are Assad supporters who has been paved by a change in Turkish cheer on the bloodletting in Aleppo on policy, not by support for the Free the basis of a crude, barbarised anti- Syrian Army or any other rebel group. empire sentiment: witness George Content from the autumn of 2016 on Galloway’s valediction ‘long live the to pursue its war against the Kurdish Syrian Arab Republic’. If antisemitism PYD, Turkey turned its attention away was last century’s socialism of fools, from the rebels in Aleppo, allowing the Islamophobia is this century’s anti- Russian-Iranian-regime advance while, imperialism of fools. as the Financial Times put it, ‘Russia Indeed, as the rise of the alt- gave Turkey a free hand against Syrian right illustrates, the dominance of Kurdish forces to whom it had offered Islamophobia is hardly any guarantee temporary and opportunistic support’. against the revival of antisemitism. As One can easily imagine the fate of the Enzo Traverso has argued, the segue PYD cantons once all hands, including of one into the other is not accidental.

12 Their raciological metaphors are Against the Popular Front! For a Policy incredibly similar: ‘The beards, tefellin of Class against Class! and kaftans of the Jewish immigrants The Trumpocene is, then, an from eastern Europe [of the early overdetermined moment. It condenses twentieth century] correspond to the an accumulation of dysfunctions and beards and veils of the Muslims today pathologies long brewing within the … Judaism and Islam both function as carapace of a liberal world order. In a negative metaphors of alterity; a century new era of global capitalist crisis, the ago, the Jew as painted by popular Washington Consensus is buckling, iconography inevitably had a hooked and the political parties upholding it nose and sticking-out ears, just as Islam across Europe and North America are today is identified by the burqa’. While hollowing out. America’s supremacy much of the neo- and post-fascist Right by dollar and bullet in the Middle East has made a conscious effort to shed pre- has been under strain, creating a space war variants of biological antisemitism, for recrudescent Russian imperialism. the cultural tropes of Jew-baiting were The deployment of Islamophobia to visible in the Trump campaign and are organise war and repression, solidify all over the pro-Trump far-right media, new political coalitions, regiment most notoriously Breitbart. urban struggles over resources, and Tellingly, some of the loudest coordinate anti-welfare policies in the advocates for this refulgent Streicherism preceding era has birthed a vicious are staunch apologists for Israel. The new radical right. All this in the context Zionist Organisation of America’s of accelerating climate catastrophe so dinner date with Steve Bannon, and precipitous that the question is not how Alan Dershowitz’s defence of Bannon to ‘avoid’ it, but how to fight for a world against well-founded charges of in which it is a given, worsening reality. promoting antisemitism, shocked How do we on the Left occupy liberal Jewish opinion, but it was just any of the spaces created by these the loudest of a chorus of hard-right dysfunctions, and put them to work for Zionist defences of the alt-right. This is our own purposes? Can we break the cause for disgust but not amazement: reactionary wedge? Israel and its hasbara merchants, as a To defeat an energised, racist right, logical corollary of the colonial struggle in the United Kingdom there is much against Palestine and the identification excitable talk, as if the concept was of Israel’s survival with US global brand new, of a ‘progressive alliance’ power, have been among the most – a grouping that, in most versions, vitriolic traducers of Islam as, per is supposed to include, of all possible Efraim Karsh’s claim, an ‘imperialist’ partners, the Liberal Democrats. If creed. pursued, this would end in a worse historical impasse than resulted from  previous iterations of such alliances – or

13 ‘popular fronts’ – such as the effort the very underlying social reality by the British soft left to forge an which demands alliances – the anti-Thatcherite coalition extending fragmentation of political identities, from Neil Kinnock to Tory ‘wets’. the weakness of the renascent left, the It’s one thing for Corbyn and his tactical conservatism of an emaciated allies to contemplate parliamentary trade-union movement – has been alliances with the SNP, Plaid Cymru brought about with no small amount and the Greens, who will on some of help from the decaying centre that key issues give him more reliable now demands the right to fix it. votes than his own backbenchers: in A decisive and depressing an electoral system in which a clear factor in this situation is the majority is likely to elude Labour, left’s relative backwardness, its this sort of alliance has a certain underdevelopment, its being no logic. This cannot be said of the match for the situation. Jeremy Liberal Democrats, whose leader Corbyn’s socialist leadership of the has snapped, with pup-like yaps, Labour Party was won in the context at Corbyn’s heels since he took the of a dialectic of defeats. leadership. To tie the fortunes of It was the very crushing of the the left to an avatar of the collapsing organised left that ensured it was centre, without any ‘progressive’ unable to create a viable nationwide credentials, will ensure that the latter radical split from social democracy, sucks everything that approaches leaving Labour the only game in into its diminishing space. town, in England at least. It was There is an urgent need for the painful and protracted decline coalitions to face down the radical of the trade-union movement from right, but not on the terms of an the Thatcherite ‘war of movement’ establishment centre the strategies to the slow euthanasia of the Blair and rhetoric of which have been period, and its renewed throttling found repeatedly wanting, from under austerity, that ensured union Cameron-Clegg, to Clinton, to Renzi. leaders took the unprecedented The oblivious sense of wounded step of voting for the hard-left entitlement with which this centre candidate to lead Labour. It was greets its demise would make the bitterness following from the its representatives spiteful and Scottish referendum defeat that useless partners, even if such an ensured the right-wing heartlands ‘alliance’ meant anything more than of Labourism transferred, wholesale, standing down Labour candidates to the SNP. This is an incomplete to give the Liberals a clear run dialectic, an unfinished symphony against the Tory right. At any rate, whose movements can be counted

14 on to catch the left’s fledgling renewal of austerity amid ‘Brexit organisations by surprise. blues’ will tend to exacerbate the There is, beyond the electoral worst dysfunctions and deprivations, expressions of the left, and its including social cleansing and the fracturing along national and party locking out of growing numbers of lines, a social left, a radicalising young (especially racially oppressed) minority which is also a political people from the housing and labour and cultural counterweight – late markets. to the game – to the dynamic force The unexpected windfall of of the radical right. On various Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour axes there is at least a potential for Party has begun, slowly and some increasing radicalisation to incrementally, to shift the debate on the left. On the question of living some of these issues, to hold back the standards, Britain’s wages have tide of officially sanctioned sadism fallen harder and faster than at any just a little bit. But weak as the left time since the 1910s: the stabilisation revival is, it has not begun to make of British capitalism in the twentieth a dent on the misery now deepening, century depended on long periods to borrow Larkin’s inaccurate and of average wage growth, not charming metaphor, like a coastal contraction. With the trade-union shelf. movement unable to do much to The infrastructure against stymy the losses, there’s no sign of social misery has yet to be built. these living-standard trends being The associations needed to replace impeded, notwithstanding the the lost cultures of trade unionism ersatz ‘white workerism’ of the May and cooperativism, not to mention administration. Temporarily less- communism, have to be constructed bad-than-feared economic news since almost out of new materials. The the EU referendum has provoked progressive alliance we need, a wave of idiotic perky boosterism whatever electoral calculations from Michael Gove and conservative Corbyn may, honourably enough, Brexiteers: but ‘[r]eality hurts’, in make, is not primarily of the the words of David Blanchflower, parliamentary type. His call for a formerly of the Bank of England’s ‘social movement’ can become a monetary policy committee, and ‘the shibboleth, but it’s perspicacious news is not going to get better’, as to the extent that if the hundreds business investment, already low, of thousands of new recruits to dips, and inflation rises – which will Labour can do anything useful it is continue to lower real wage growth, to organise the working class: not if not real wages. The accompanying just in specific defensive campaigns –

15 Save the Library, Stop the Cuts – but on of the organisation. The justification the offensive too, in efforts to unionise showed how half-hearted and bungled the precarious, organise residents for this effort was: the meeting had to be affordable housing, occupy higher cancelled because it conflicted with education, and so on. another regional Labour meeting that With some 20,000 members, day. This meant it could be rescheduled money and a media profile, the left while the leadership’s opponents, not Labour group Momentum, one could without some justice, cried foul. have hoped, could be the militantly In their mutual escalation around organised grassroots of Corbynism. this issue, the parties to this dispute As of writing, unfortunately, it is have neglected to specify any other descending into a bitter, unseemly and concrete issue: as if the real issue was predictable faction fight between a ownership. As if any group on the Left weak leadership group and some of the had a proven track record, or an innate most degenerated particles of British right to inherit the colossal opportunity Trotskyism (the latter comprising a represented by Corbyn’s breakthrough. few exhausted ex-Militants, and the Meanwhile, the importation of acolytes of Sean Matgamna). This fight, a certain seaside kitsch into official for contingent reasons, has crystallised patriotism – May’s plea for a ‘red, white around the question of Momentum’s and blue Brexit’ – along with the revived voting system. Most of the remnants anti-immigrant offensive signalled of Trotskyism may not know that by Dame Louise Casey’s review into they are political detritus, ground- ‘opportunity and integration’, is yet down particles of something that once again raising the national question. mattered, but they do know that with Here, there is very little space to feel a traditional structure of delegate-run encouraged. The prospect of Scottish conferences, they have the skills to pack independence, this time gained on meetings and get more people elected the basis of admission to a neoliberal than their infinitesimal stature should supranational institution rather than permit. Opposing them, the relics of on radical social-democratic and anti- Eighties Bennism want a one-member- nuclear demands, is being met by a one-vote system in which decisions are strained and unconvincing ‘progressive’ taken by online voting, presumably on British or English patriotism from the the basis that it will empower the better- softer end of Corbynism. Even its more known, celebrity wing of Momentum. laudably intransigent elements on With characteristic tactical finesse, this issue, such as Diane Abbott, feel in their panic at the phantasmagorical constrained to pay at least some tribute threat of Trotskyist takeover, this to the idols of national belonging. latter group voted to cancel a national This is a strategy predicated, in committee meeting at which they feared many cases, on systematic bad faith. losing the vote on the future shape Salvage considers the (long-standing)

16 tradition of ‘left patriotism’ to be utterly For such reasons, and in the face of and disastrously wrong-headed, but we the Unite union’s pro-Corbyn leader don’t dispute that some of its advocates Len McCluskey’s carefully crafted ‘left’ are sincere – if at best muddled – in triangulation with anti-immigration their patriotic ‘commitment’ to ‘their’ sentiment, we full-throatedly support country, whatever that might mean. In his opponent in the forthcoming most modern quasi-Corbynite versions, General Secretary election, Ian Allinson. however, its advocates’ justification for Allinson’s platform (at ian4unite.org) the position is that others, the working of militant solidarity with migrants class, very often that ‘white working and defence for freedom of movement class’, demand it. That this discourse – and for a fighting union in general – must be spoken, rather than that they deserves the support of all socialists. wish to speak it. We put it to them that Of course, we recognise that if they are not prepared to proclaim ordinary working-class people do have themselves proud to be British – as we legitimate concerns about migration. emphatically are not – their proclaimed Ordinary working-class people are patriotism is a lie. concerned that they may drown in And, further, lie or not, this the Mediterranean when they migrate strategy will fail. The symbols of British for better living conditions. They are nationhood are so heavily structured concerned that the people with whom by racist and conservative politics they share conditions of life and as to make their capture for and by work will despise them because they the left impossible, even if it were came from somewhere else. They are desirable. Meanwhile, the attempt worried that they may be subject to to bask in UKIP’s aura and soak up state violence because of the colour of some of its swivel-eyed charisma will their skin or the visible signs of their merely alienate the victims of resentful religious belief. These are working-class nationalism who should be part of concerns, and Salvage calls for a politics any real progressive alliance. Rather, that addresses them. it is incumbent on the Left to argue Our position is simple – it is that – both for and against Corbyn(ism) – of Eugene Debs and John Maclean, that concerns about social deprivation namely that a patriot is an international are real, but that the causes thereof scab. Contra the left patriots, our are nothing to do with immigrants; commitment to those aspects of British that there is no number that would society and history that we value – and not be ‘too high’ for the bigots or there are many – has everything to do those persuaded by them, that this with what they are in themselves, their is scapegoating that lets those really concrete content, and nothing to do responsible for social decay off the hook with the fact that they are ‘British’. – which is in part why they are such The ‘patriotism’ schtick is merely enthusiasts for its deployment. one mode of grand strategising without

17 a base; would-be generals without thoughtful and open debate. And of armies, imagining that merely by the statements of clear positions that hoisting the flag one can summon the this would necessitate, John McDonnell troops and take power. and the other Corbynites are evasive, Another more hesitant iteration of preferring to nebulously demand ‘a this is the Corbynite evasiveness on the Brexit that works for people’ – in what specifics of its preferred Brexit. That the looks at best like an attempt to play bien pensants are furious about this, and for time, at worst an underwhelming what they see as inadequate opposition attempt at left triangulation with the to ‘Hard Brexit’ (walking away from the pro-Brexitism of pro-Brexit workers. European single market mechanisms It will not work as such, and simply in toto) largely because they are still appears incoherent or indecisive. in deep mourning for the Europe of None of us envy Corbyn’s team their comforting and self-aggrandising being faced with such situations. imaginary, does not mean that there But their only chance at building is no case for the Labour leadership to in the fracturing political system, answer. reconstituting a solid, left Labour Party, On the two key specifics – is to stake out radical positions. These single-market membership and free will alienate the Blairite voters – and movement – Salvage is of course Labour’s results in Tory heartlands will militantly committed to the latter, and suffer, as they have in Sleaford. But this deeply suspicious of the former, given would be a corollary of the necessary the strong tendency in the European rebuilding and strengthening of the mechanisms to prioritising neoliberal demoralised working-class base. At structures, and to EU rules promoting the moment, the results in the Labour ‘liberalisation’ (that could, for example, heartlands are not disastrous – but nor undermine attempts to renationalise are they inspiring, and there is a very British railways). There could be long way to go. legitimate debate on the Left on this This massive, years-long, arduous (not on free movement), however, task will not be won by caution, still less particularly given the current, no-less- by triangulation, even of a left variant. and-very-possibly-more-brutal, shock- So far, the Labour Party leadership has doctrine economic terrain outside the not displayed anything like the urgency single market, the hard-right Arcadia that, while absolutely not sufficient, is of the WTO and the ‘Hard Brexiters’. absolutely necessary for the task. One of our tasks is to start to build a The problem that faces Corbyn mass movement for, if not revolution, – and us – is that there is no forward at least some new international left- movement without the movement, and Keynesianism precisely to break out of social struggles cannot be summoned that invidious non-choice. But to start into existence by force of propaganda. towards such a movement requires If, as Gramsci once put it, the only

18 scientific prediction is of struggle, political immaturity. An unwillingness we might add that there is no science to bear, as one necessarily must, with without struggle. The calculation of tragedy as it unfolds, with rapt energetics and fields of force only attention, waiting for the moment at makes sense where there are actual which one can best act, striving to bring quantities of movement. Until such it closer. It is not to advocate quietism time, the ferocity of internecine fights, to insist that the task is long, that we and the bitterness of recrimination must, as the saying goes, be willing to and denunciation, is an impetuous gather our fruits in season. Otherwise, displacement, a sign of impatience and we will harvest dirt and ashes.

6 January 2017 The Editors

www.salvage.zone

19 ‘The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.’ - Theodor Adorno

20