America - Learning Nothing and Forgetting Nothing

What is that cliche about the Bourbon restoration - learned nothing and forgotten nothing?  This certainly applies to American policy wonks who were trying to work out what was to be done after the Afghan fiasco. The result would appear to have been another fiasco in the making over in the Eastern bloodlands of Europe. The insistent political ambition of the American elite to engage in ideological intervention overseas at the expense of their own taxpayers remains dominant regardless of past errors (an ideological mind-set shared by many in our own British political elite and now infecting Europe at its highest levels). And yet dreadful domestic problems continue to rot the US just as the social democratic consensus in Europe collapses under the pressure of liberal economics. Poverty, lack of healthcare, poor education and collapsing infrastructure, guns out of control (which makes the FT's insistence that Russia is lawless look stupid to say the least). American foreign policy incompetence adds to domestic disenchantment and foreign doubt. It feeds populism by the back door.

Exactly what is America's game here? The cynical view is that its upper middle class political leaderships have abandoned their own people because growing empires require constant expansion and increasing asset values for its upper middle class clientele is all that matters in American politics. The fraying theory, of course, remains that the rich 'trickle down' wealth to the poor. The 'trickle down' of the alleged benefits at home was supposed to be sufficient to retain power in democracies fixed by party machines and big money. This, of course, looks a highly problematic strategy at the moment. Russia, far from isolated, has turned to a receptive China that has a ready ear for its own anti-imperialist narrative across Africa and Latin America. Multipolarity is becoming a fact this year rather than just the propaganda fantasy of the Kremlin. Constant market and asset expansion was to be enabled by building up equally neglectful and narcissistic upper middle class elites elsewhere in the world yet these elites have developed the same resistance to being patronised by the West as the working classes within the West. Markets are shrinking and not expanding. Perhaps those 'fixes' can continue for quite some time - but what happens when the money runs out?

 

With recession on the way we can already see a class war looming where the asset holders will want the system they think they own to ease up on interest rates and allow more inflation. Yet the intelligent part of the elite understands that their rule may collapse on sustained high inflation because it hurts the asset-poor (the majority of voters) far more than high interest rates hurt the asset-rich. The asset rich are relying on the asset poor to remain 'stupid' and disorganised which is why they so deeply resent the arrival of politicians like Trump who organise far from stupid people using only apparently stupid political tropes. A less economically cynical view, however, is that middle class politicians in the West simply have nothing to say to their own masses any more. Their culture is simply different. They only want to talk to people like them who they can nurture in foreign climes ... they had hoped that a nice liberal middle class would emerge in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Kabul, one that would construct the institutional forms that would require no concern for the 'damned of the earth' except as beneficiaries of aid, 'trickle down' and 'culture' from on high while the ownership of the assets around them remained theirs. When a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (now removed) can effectively abandon his own constituency and become de facto Member for Kiev Central in Parliament, then you know this propensity for class internationalism has reached its most decadent phase.

As to the official American strategy in relation to Ukraine, it is simply a sign of weakness ... pouring funds into the Ukrainian money pit, evading the use of hard power, promoting an economic war that is undermining the West itself and dying to the last Ukrainian with weaponry whose use only enriches the major arms manufacturers. Apparently there are 40,000 committed Ukrainians in eight brigades (or whatever) armed to the teeth by the West just waiting to enter the meat grinder without perhaps realising that any victory will be Pyrrhic - their land and assets are already assigned to Western private capital as the only means of getting the finance for reconstruction. Blood and soil is not going to mean much when the blood of the most fit leaches out onto the soil and that soil belongs to some corporation listed on the NYSE or operating from a headquarters in Berlin or Tokyo.

But do Japan and South Korea (or Taipei) really believe that the US will do anything much more than they have done for Ukraine (prolong a devastating war at the expense of a people and a land) if China moves against Taiwan? I doubt it - it will be moral posturing once again, psy-ops directed at the homeland suckers and rhetorical gestures. Even the moralising American middle class know that they will be the losers if a strategy that largely hurts the poor, the young and the developing world ever became a real war. Those assets will eventually become cinders. Fortunately, the Chinese almost certainly have no intention of going into Taiwan with military force in the short to medium term - they are hoping the opposition Kuomintang will do that job for them. We should perhaps hope that they are right.

As for legislatures of 'hawks' getting involved in international relations, little makes me more scared - whether Congress, the Duma (which has to be restrained by the Kremlin as much as used), the UK Parliament or the greatest ineffectual moral posturing organisation in the world, the European Parliament. Congress is scariest of them all because Congress is at the heart of the most terrifying war machine the planet has ever seen and the most excitably irrational. The Taiwanese situation had been significantly worsened by Pelosi's blundering into it. Just as bad, here in the UK, Parliamentary hawks in the Tory Party, copied slavishly by one of the intellectually weakest Labour leaders in its history, have set the agenda for the nation. Their policies have resulted in 10% plus inflation, actual shortages and rising interest rates. It is not much better in Russia where nationalist expectations almost certainly limit the ability of the Kremlin to cut any reasonable deal with the comedian who runs Ukraine. Zelensky, in turn, is trapped by the nationalists on his own side and his need to keep on trucking to ensure he gets what he really needs - huge tranches of post-war reconstruction aid and support to rebuild his military as cat's paw for NATO in the East. Really, we 'ordinary folk' in all countries need to start standing up to the political class before they destroy us all. We need alternatives and we need them fast.

Narrating The Current Crisis - What Trump May Mean

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States is a fact on the ground. Even if Jill Stein somehow succeeded in overturning the result through recounts, it is to be doubted that the populist movement would accept the revision. A Hillary Clinton Presidency would be a wounded beast, facing an angry Republican Congress and probable civil strife and under vicious and continuous internet attack. The world beyond the United States, having congratulated Trump once, will be embarrassed to have to become partisan by subsequently congratulating Clinton. The deeper truth is that Trump has won even if he loses a recount. He has destabilised liberal America and mobilised populist America. That clock cannot be turned back. Nor is Trump's victory is an isolated event. A number of similar political events across the West suggest that a radical change affecting international relations is under way and that the process has not yet concluded. Let us provide a new narrative of contemporary history and see where it leads us.

We can start by saying that the neo-liberal model and its ameliorative liberal internationalist and post-Cold War international socialist variants have improved conditions for many millions outside the West but they have arguably also enriched up to half of domestic Western populations at the expense of the condition, security and identity of the other half as well as created oligarchical minorities elsewhere. Neo-liberalism and its variants have also not brought peace. On the contrary, a forward expansion of liberal values by force has destabilised many countries, leading to mass movement of peoples (which brings free movement of peoples into disrepute amongst those who have not benefited from globalisation), has created new security threats, has forced non-Western sovereign states into defensive militaristic postures and has even recreated the conditions for superpower competition and confrontation only a quarter of a century after the ending of the Cold War.

There have been benefits from quasi-socialist and liberal ameliorative strategies operating at a global level, especially in terms of the mobilisation of progressive forces outside the West and the engagement of young activists in progressive politics within it but regulatory regimes have tended to pay only lip service to democracy and to have preferred corporatist structures in which activist minorities collaborate with corporate CSR departments and government agencies to impose legal and regulatory solutions to global problems without consultation with or the political education of those in the West left behind. They also tend to treat emerging country populations as ‘subjects’ of action rather than as independent actors engaged in their own liberatory struggle.

The role of the United States has been ambiguous. The promotion of a progressive liberal agenda has often operated alongside a militaristic and expansionist agenda. This has created a class of international NGO activists ‘who mean well’ but it has also created alliances with faith-based obscurantists who feign democracy and, in turn, also created its own obscurantist and reactionary oppositionism prepared to engage in armed struggle to defend identity against what they see as cultural imperialism. National liberation has moved from the progressive Left to the reactionary Right, the United Nations has been diminished and, at its worst, the reaction to Western ideological expansionism has created cause for new threats of asymmetric warfare operated by terrorists allied with organised crime.

Globalisation, in collapsing borders, has also permitted massive capital accumulation by organised crime, free riding the increase in international trade, in facilitating illegal economic migration (often willing but sometimes enslaved), piracy, online fraud and the trade in narcotics and banned substances as well as in armaments and illicit untaxed funds. The liberal internationalist regulatory strategy has scarcely made a dent in this expansion of non-state activity which may be classed as criminal by state moralists but, in some areas, represents the developing world’s own rational exploitation of globalisation.

The negative response to this situation was originally restricted to two distinct movements. The first was the rise of a domestic Western anti-war movement which split progressive forces into those who supported liberal values expansion and those who saw it as imperialistic. The second saw the co-emergence of neo-nationalist resistance to the claims of the West. Both appeared in the wake of Western intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. During this period, the Liberal Establishment of the West was in a strong enough position to ignore the anti-war movements and to place continued pressure on non-Western nations, not excluding attempts at regime change by stealth, often indirect through 'Foundations'. The prospect of a global hegemony for the West, based on market economics, oligarchical democracy and rights ideology, was considered real by the liberal’ hawks’. At this time, right wing national populist forces in the West were largely marginal.

In 2008, a major economic crisis transformed the situation. The capitalist system teetered briefly on the edge but proved resilient. However, its resilience was purchased at the price of a strategy of domestic austerity which continues to this day. This coincided with growing acceptance that liberal interventionism using force had been a disaster that had not achieved its ends although the full fruits of that disaster would still not be seen for some time (exemplified by the Syrian tragedy). Confidence in the elite was shaken but the solution of the voters was, at this stage, to grumble but change the captains of the fleet, not the direction of the navy.

The Coalition Government of 2010 in the UK and the Obama Administration which came to office as the recession of 2008’s effects were unfolding continued governance much as before but a series of developments shook confidence in the elite: above all, the economic crisis itself and the associated fact that, though economies were stabilised, growth did not return. The self-identifying middle classes (actually the middling and lower middle classes and upper working class) were disproportionately hit by the consequences. The rich appeared to get richer. Austerity measures were increasingly judged to be applied unfairly to keep elected officials in power by appealing to the half of the population fearful of taxation. Elected officials were increasingly seen as self-interested and even corrupt or certainly beholden to the economic interests who had caused the crash. In foreign affairs, incapable of winning wars, democratic states proved perfectly capable of war crimes and out of touch with public distaste for foreign adventurism. Since progressive governments had either presided over the conditions that led to the crash or were presiding over the failure to deal with the consequence of the crash, public discontent tended to move to the right rather than the left (although populist movements appeared of both types). This was compounded by a new factor - the pressure of mass migration as 'free movement of peoples' turned from a dream into a nightmare that liberal ideologues failed to recognise as such.

The failure of the Arab Spring and other democracy movements saw a hardening of state power across the emerging world and in the communist and former communist states. These latter states also took a more neo-nationalist stance, fully aware of the role of Western elites in attempted regime destabilisation. Noting Russia’s successful incursion into Georgia, they began the process of resisting liberal Western incursion and then turning back the tide of Western expansion, a process in which Russia took the lead with its acquisition of Crimea and its own intervention in defence of the existing order in Syria. If the liberal internationalists continued to pursue their strategy either directly or indirectly through ‘philanthropic’ foundations, these not only made little headway but created further instabilities which neo-nationalists could exploit. A huge class, an 'industry', of otherwise unemployable graduates created a special interest bloc in the West of 'activists' and 'campaigners', appealing to that part of the electorate with a deontological view of international affairs where the exclamation of a 'should' would be sufficient to demand an action that would then become an 'is' - life is rarely so simple! This was faith-based and not evidence-based politics. While the Left began to split into its liberal left and socialist components with increasingly bitter recriminations between the two over austerity, identity politics, liberal economics and foreign policy, the real beneficiary of this break down in the liberal Western paradigm was the neo-nationalist and populist Right which now began to grow rapidly within the West.

The negative populist reaction to liberal elite failure was both a Left and a Right phenomenon but it was the Right that was enabled to remain united in its opposition. Most of the establishment Left were implicated in the failures and errors of the current regime. This has been symbolised well in the last week by the unprecedented decision of an incumbent French Socialist President of France not to put himself forward as the candidate of his Party in next year's Presidential Election. Liberal elements on the Left had refused to compromise with public anger because of liberal ideology and so saw their side split into factions and their acceptability diminish except among special interest groups who had nowhere else to go (such as public sector white collar employees and NGO workers). Meanwhile the populist Right, taking overt inspiration from the effective opposition to liberal hegemony of Putin (Russia), created an alliance of the lower middle class with national trading and financial interests and discontented working class people whose economic interests had been ignored and whose culture had been disrespected by urban liberals. These latter created a network of interconnected national populist movements that claimed democracy and freedom (not without reason in some cases), seizing power quite quickly in Hungary and Poland but increasingly setting the terms of debate elsewhere and posing material threats to the established order in countries as different as the UK, France and Italy.

The first major breakthrough for populism against the elite was not on the Right but on the Left with the surprise election of a marginal figure (Jeremy Corbyn) to the Leadership of the Labour Party, Instead of accepting the result, the liberal wing of the party undertook a war of attrition against their new Leader. This halted any chance of Labour becoming the voice for British populism instead of UKIP. By the time he was established firmly as Leader (even then clearly being undermined despite that), the initiative had long since passed to UKIP and thence to the Leave Campaign for Brexit. This same opportunity was lost more recently in the US when the DNC conspired to halt the rise to power of the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, confident that their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton would have the confidence of the American people. This split on the Left and widespread economic discontent presents us with weak versions of Lenin’s famous three pre-conditions for revolution. All that were missing were the cadres to seize power. These were provided by ruthless well-funded populist machines, wholly dedicated to achieving power, in successively the Brexit Vote and the 2016 Presidential Election and strong enough to push aside even the mainstream media which had been arbiter of politics for the bulk of post-industrial history.

The victory of these forces is truly revolutionary for the following reasons:-

1. They have forced conservative forces to accommodate the key populist demands of the neo-nationalists – we see this in the strategic commitment of the May Government to Brexit and the degree to which previously negative conservative Republicans have offered their full support to the incoming President
2. They have given encouragement strategically and tactically to national populists elsewhere, most notably in Europe where there are real fears amongst liberals that their last major stronghold (the European Union) may fall to neo-nationalism or implode under pressure from neo-nationalism
3. They have not merely out-manoeuvred the progressive Left but have forced it into a crisis with the two factions (the socialists and the liberal) now engaged in a bitter existential struggle for dominance as the primary opposition force – a process that may take many months or even years to result in victory for one side. It is just as likely that these forces will split into separate ‘parties’, dividing the Left for a generation.
4. Moreover, they have managed to ‘detourne’ the liberal left so that it appears to be increasingly anti-democratic and irrational as well as arrogant and narcissistic, the historical attributes of the Right. This latter may be the populists’ greatest achievement in the long run.
5. They have introduced other apparently left-wing strategic policies – including variants of Keynesianism and anti-imperialism/peace – into populist discourse leaving the liberal (rather than the democratic socialist) Left as justificatory spokespeople for austerity, corporatism and even war (which in itself fuels the civil war within the Left).
6. They have adopted a paradoxical inter-nationalism in which strong nation states collaborate as they compete, concentrating on trade relations and deal-making rather than war – again, this is a ’detournement’ of traditional Left positions which have abandoned inter-nationalism and national liberation for supra-nationalism and trans-nationalism.
7. Above all, they have appealed over the heads of the Left beyond their traditional lower middle class base to the non-public sector working class (at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries), adopting their values, respecting their culture and (at least superficially) supporting their economic interests. This has split the working class from the Left in a decisive historical shift that saw a third of working class votes go for Brexit despite Labour backing for Remain and the Democrat’s white working class support dramatically hollowing out on November 8th.

The importance of the Trump phenomenon is that whoever commands the United States of America commands the general thrust of international relations policy. It is now clear that a national populist agenda is in charge of that thrust, directly or indirectly (in the event of a disputed result) for at least four and probably eight years and maybe twelve years That is sufficient time (as Reagan showed) to transform the condition of the world for good or ill. It is likely that a more moderate but allied Conservative Government will be in office in the UK for at least four years and possibly nearly a decade and that the European Union will see a major transfer of power to the national populist right in several major nations and possibly the implosion of the liberal model for the Union as a whole.

This is as strategically important as the arrival of communism and fascism in the 1920s. Even if states were not communist or fascist by the 1930s, they often adapted their politics not merely to challenge these forces but to appropriate aspects of them in order better to challenge them. National populism in a number of variants, including liberal and Left variants, are likely to become the hegemonic form of international relations discourse for at least the next decade and probably much longer This does not mean the Left does not represent a challenge to the new Right. Neither of national populism’s great victories (the US Election and Brexit) were overwhelming – the Democrats still (barely) won a majority of the popular vote and we have noted the theoretical possibility of the result being overturned by recounts. Similarly, Brexit is accepted by both major parties but the debate over whether the UK is to have a 'soft' or 'hard' Brexit permits Remainers to believe they can overturn the mandate through stealth or attrition. But the Left now has a major problem of credibility – it is associated with arrogance, incompetence, corruption and hypocrisy and, increasingly, with a rather dubious attitude to democracy.

Another problem the Left has is one of division – there are now two major competing visions for defeating neo-nationalism, the liberal and the socialist, which are fundamentally incompatible. The former will not adapt, compromise and let go of power while the latter sees the former as equally if not more problematic than the populists (who inconveniently will not go all the way to being fascists or official racists or xenophobes despite intense attempts by liberal propagandists to make these connections). Moreover, many socialists have more in common with Trump on key aspects of foreign and economic policy than they do with their own liberal ‘allies’ while many liberals are clearly highly emotional about single and identity issues that socialists see as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Given that Jill Stein only got 1% of the vote and 40% of women voted for Trump, the environmentalist and feminist commitments that lead Left thinking are also probable barriers to recapturing working class support.

To all intents and purposes, November 8th was a devastating blow to the liberal internationalist project. Funding will continue from European (at least until 2018) and from Liberal Foundation sources but US and UK Government sources are likely to dry up quite rapidly in the coming months. More to the point, the US and UK Governments are no longer going to be available to promote many liberal causes with emerging world Governments even if the British Government appears to remain committed to some important international rights-related treaties. UK Government action will be redirected at trade deals forcing European countries to follow suit. Major international agencies will have their role questioned with expectations that policy be in accordance with national populist values. The Business & Human Rights Treaty is unlikely to make progress until the current cycle is over - unless it is made more business-friendly.  The balance of power has shifted.

Corporate reactions fall into various special interest categories with many welcoming the new populism, others (with large urban liberal customer bases) nervous of boycotts and politicisation and others concerned about the collapse of the existing liberal internationalist order. One likely result is that all but the bravest corporation will start to withdraw funding from social liberal projects that might be classed as political where once they were simply classed as CSR (corporate social responsibility). Public affairs departments are reeling under the shock because they tend to be staffed by ‘urban liberals and liberal conservatives’, people who have had a stake in the preceding order and a career path that might include political office. Now, they have to consider their options as business splits into camps according to their relationship to various factions in the culture wars. However we look at it, independent funding is likely to decrease or shift into obviously charitable projects where those charities are not engaged in political lobbying. Radical capitalists like Soros and Branson are swimming against the tide. They are also not getting any younger.

Culturally, the liberal internationalists are faced with the problem that they are no longer ‘hegemonic’ within the West. Half the population rejects their hegemony. A significant part of the leadership of the 'hegemonic half' is questioning the strategy of arrogance towards the working and lower middle classes. Globalisation is in question intellectually. Liberal internationalists no longer hold all the commanding heights of power (and may not recover ground until 2020 or even 2024 or 2028) and, if they do recapture them, it will be a much weakened position - Weimar or Leon Blum's Popular Front to all intents and purposes. Their funding is about to fall except from highly politicised Foundations who are now in a confrontational relationship with the sources of power that can deliver what liberal NGOs want. Soros, for example, has openly declared war on the Trump Administration which places the Trump Administration alongside every 'regime' that Soros wants to overturn - their enemies' enemy is Trump. Every attempt to assert radical liberal values now has a countervailing, often cogent and aggressively positioned, alt-right argument. As liberal social media platforms try to cut out the alt-right, new platforms appear to serve it.

Two cultural opponents within the West are now evenly matched for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union and this has happened in under a year. As in all such struggles in the past, it will be hard for anyone to stay out of the fight and stay in public life. The old Right/Left conflict is changing into a conflict between democratic nationalism and inter-nationalism on the one side and supra-nationalism and liberal internationalism on the other. A third of the Left, mostly working class, will find itself moving into what will be positioned as the New Right and a third of the Right, mostly managerial business and white collar professionals, will find themselves moving into the Liberal Left. The former have the old media, the universities, the 'intellectuals' and the scribblers. The latter may have the most innovative parts of the new media, the public meetings, the bulk of social media sharers and the people who discuss public affairs in the pubs rather tham the wine bars. And we are only at the beginning ...

Empires & Resistance

Around 425 BC, Athenian imperialism turned on the small city-state of Melos. The Melians wished to stay neutral but this was not good enough for the leading 'democracy' of the day fighting its own 'evil imperial adversary' Sparta.

The Melians decided to resist despite the superior military resources of the Athenians. This is what they said: " ... to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect ..."

The Melians relied on action as 'hope' but not much better than that. The sentiment is one familiar to those who have studied the Amerindian resistance to the white settlers - an appeal to the essential rightness of their world because it has always been so but awareness deep down of the futility of it all.

Needless to say, there were no gods to trust in and they were crushed. For their resistance, despite fighting bravely, the men were all slaughtered and the women and children were all enslaved. Thus, the glorious conduct of a democracy that has acted as beacon for the modern world's sentimental liberals.

The Athenians had serious ideas about freedom and justice, of course, but they were ideas only for themselves or to be imposed on others for their own ultimate convenience - an attitude of mind familiar to us today. Imperialists can never leave things alone. They must meddle.

Putting Ideas into Rebel's Mouths

Half a millennium later, the Roman historian Tacitus almost certainly created the Calgacus who may or may not have been a genuine Celtic chieftain defeated by the Roman Empire around 80-83AD when Rome was busy thieving the British Isles from its indigenous peoples.

Tacitus 'invents' or reports a statement of resistance to imperialism that stands alongside those that emerged later from North American indigenous tribes.

"To us who dwell on the uttermost confines of the earth and of freedom, this remote sanctuary of Britain's glory has up to this time been a defence ... there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission

"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches."

And then these famous lines: "To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire: they make a desert and call it peace."  I suppose, if anyone asks, this provides the basis for a reasonable answer to the question of what the Romans did for us ...

You may compare this again to another alleged speech, this time of Hatuey, Chief of the Tainos, who led the guerrilla resistance against the Spanish in what was to become Cuba and who was captured and burned alive at the stake in 1511:

"Here is the God the Spaniards worship ... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of Peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. 

"They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they steal our belongings, seduce our women, rape our daughters. Incapable of matching our courage in battle, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break."

Again, the speech strikes one as constructed for literary purposes by the conquerors but the sentiments were inspiring to Cuban revolutionaries as perhaps one day what Calgacus said might inspire the people of Britain in their struggle against European bureaucracy.

Still, they could be seen as a bit of a futile whine from the losers in life's race if one was so inclined.

And, of course, the 'real' savages of the Celtic North and North America were not averse to a bit of tribal violence, rapine and thievery against their weaker tribal neighbours (the Tainos no doubt warred with the Caribs as the Wichita with the Comanches). Nor did Melos' wealth come without slaves.

But for Hatuey's God, read Calgacus' Rome and the iron horse is an analogue to the superior organisation of the Romans or the Athenians but what the writers really see through is the use of ideology as cover for rapine.

For the savages, thuggery is just what they do, for us civilised ones, it has to be justified.

In the first case, pagan 'virtue' is implicit rather than stated but, in the second, the reference to the God of the Christians is explicit. Ideology is part of the machinery of theft. The violence and brutality, as each ages passes, gets cloaked in more layers of essentialist guff.

At least in these cases, some people within the imperial systems knew that bad things were being done in the name of the good and were prepared to ask questions but, whether Roman bureaucrats or Spanish monks, the critique is always elliptical.

Tacitus and our anonymous Hispanic chronicler have the resigned air of the fearful intellectual within the system who wishes the world could be different and then goes back to his laden table. We know the type - the op ed columns of our contemporary media are filled with such sentimentalists.

Slave Revolts

But empires are not only about the business of acquiring land and agricultural and mineral resources, they are also about acquiring labour resources.

Globalisation today is about the re-allocation of labour resources for the profit of the imperiums of our day as much as capture of slaves by armed force has been the central dynamic of past empires. In the past, this meant a far more overt commitment to slavery. But not now.

Today, empire is defined by its enabling of free movement. The defining of slavery has become the cleverly constructed differentiator of 'good' and 'bad' imperialism ever since British evangelicals took the moral high ground and made use of the British Navy to sink slavers. If only it were all so simple.

Periodically, the enslaved found a rare opportunity to resist on their terms and to 'make themselves'. Between 73 and 71BC, a major slave revolt took place within the Roman Empire led by a former gladiator of now legendary status, the Thracian former soldier Spartacus.

The revolt was put down bloodily. Despite the claims of Hollywood, Spartacus probably died in battle rather than on the cross. He should not be over-romanticised - his probable interest was to grab the spoils of Italy for a new ruling order rather than anything truly liberatory.

According to the Roman historians, he mounted one of the earliest prison break-outs in surviving history with 70 others from the slave-training school in Capua. From this perspective, whatever his motives, he can count as a figure of resistance to the Man or as a 'most wanted' criminal to taste.

Initially, he was little more than a brigand but his mere presence on and around Mount Vesuvius drew others to him and he proved a good leader of men. Local police actions were easily defeated.

A second, more determined, police effort was still underprepared, not taking this brigand seriously enough, and a Roman General (the Chief Constable, if you like) was humiliatingly lucky to escape capture.

But, in the end, when the system wants to crush you and there is no one at home base with the authority to demur, you will be crushed. And so he was.

We might compare this with the slave uprising of Ali Bin Muhammad, one of a series of such revolts of East African slaves around Basra under the Abbasids between 869 and 883 AD.

Ali was captured and executed in 881 but such revolts could involve up to 500,000 slaves, indicating the degree to which the Arab Abbasids depended as much on stolen human labour as the Romans - and as much as did the foundation of the British Empire for that matter.

The Abbasids, often praised, like the Romans, for their cultural achievements, drew in East African blacks into the marshlands in order to reclaim them for agriculture and feed their teeming Baghdad. These are the same territories that Saddam Hussein granted to his top officers for services rendered.

As with Spartacus, Ali appeared out of nowhere and began liberating slaves in batches ranging from 50 to 500 until he had accumulated a formidable force that was promised property (since many uprooted slaves might not be enamoured of a freedom that was hunger).

Nor was he a liberationist in the modern sense for what he promised the slaves was - their own slaves, of course.

He positioned himself (according to the legend) as a servant of Allah and was allegedly merciful to the slave traders and owners insofar as he spared their lives and freed them but only after a thorough beating from which some might well not have survived.

Today, Spartacus and Ali whose moral compasses were very limited might certainly be regarded as criminals and terrorists. The system that enslaved them in the first place made the law and revolt against that system became the crime. Again, a familiar ideological stance today.

Perhaps America's jails are holding places for psychopaths but they may also be holding places for free men enslaved when the 'crimes' are social constructs. Who is it that decides that trading in alcohol in one decade and drugs in another or engaging in consensual sex trades between equals is a 'crime'?

The last word on slave revolts come from Korea and three hundred years later, showing the ubiquity of slavery in space and time - and that what has existed once may exist again. This is from Manjok's slave rebellion which was planned but discovered and Manjok was killed - murdered, we might say.

He is said to have said:

"Are generals and ministers born to these glories? No! For when the time is auspicious anyone can hold such office. Why then should we work ourselves to the bone and suffer under the whip? ... If each hereditary slave kills his master and burns records of his status, thus ending the system of hereditary slavery in our country, then each of us will be able to become a minister or a general."

The Lessons For Today

There was no justice for the Melians, the Celts or the Tainos while the leaders of slave and peasant revolts invariably died alongside their many followers.

The 'iron' of superior organisation and technology - the sheer inertia of the few having a stake in an unfair society that gave them the resources for domination - would overwhelm any resistance to expansion or internal revolt from exploitation.

The lesson would appear to be that there is no hope in revolt under such conditions unless you just want to make a point and then die - or are just so desperate that even the risk of death is better than servility. Perhaps this lies at the heart of the suicide bomber's decision..

The only chance for the common man in the past was to tie yourself to a warlord arising on the margins of a flailing empire and hope that he wins his battles and becomes secure on his territory so that you can gain land - and slaves - of your own.

Or perhaps you could join a legion or regiment and fight the fuzzy-wuzzies for a small slice of the action ... and is this not the set of choices (revolt, warlordism or becoming an agent of state force) that is all that is left for many men in a world without economic security or personal respect.

Perhaps this is why the barbarian warlord and the insurgent are often marginally more attractive, for all their stupidities and barbarities, than the systematic exploitation of millions and then billions through a system that serves the few and not the many and then engages the many amongst its few, its own working people, in an elaborate ideological cover-up to ensure the machinery of exploitation.

There was always a link between expansion and exploitation because, then as now, servile labour could be transported across seas to keep down the price of indigenous labour and excess human production at home could be siphoned off to work the land stolen from those defeated in battle.

A strange dynamic of economic growth through atrocity built the modern world. This dynamic in its most brutal form has, of course, ended with the end of the frontier. Or has the frontier closed after all? Perhaps we have been seduced by an American internal narrative and not seen the frontiers of today.

Nearly all land has been captured for the imperial market system in theory and that which has not belongs to somewhat authoritarian states of resistance or what are called 'failed' but which might equally be called 'free' if violent, anarchic and communitarianly oppressive states.

Yet there are many 'frontiers' of asymmetry emerging once again as globalisation fails to deliver economic prosperity at the speed required to match mass aspirations and expectations - there are migration frontiers, market frontiers, frontiers where traditionalism resists commodification.

The revolution in the means of production that originated from the unique properties of the slave-based British Empire not merely enabled slavery to be replaced with 'free' labour but scored that empire an ideological lead in terms of its claims about freedom and democracy.

But these changes saw scarcely a jot of difference to the actual holding of wealth in terms of its proportions between mass and elite. It worked because the total amount of wealth rose and spread for those within the total system.

The mass could feel it was always getting richer. This in turn could lead to a reasonable working class conservatism because concern for those who were truly exploited much further down the line might disrupt the ability to survive yourself.

No doubt the Roman working classes who enjoyed free bread and circuses would quite rationally have felt the same.

However, modern elites have became far more fluid, based on innovation, but perhaps much less than we are led to believe - landholdings in the UK are still highly concentrated on surprisingly few people. What they do have is control over organisation and culture.

This whole system (today) depends on continuing trickle-down but we know that the relative benefit to (say) the American middle classes started to decline from approximately the 1970s.

What will the 'few' do when the many start to face severe economic pressure and there is no money left in the kitty for hand-outs because the 'imperial system' is running down?

They will, of course, have to rely on 'security' - superior force - as they have done whenever the mass of the population starts to get a bit itchy - and that requires an ideology of threat to justify it. It requires surveillance, cultural control, fear and quasi-gulags.

Thus it is in the logic of history that the US Administration now leads in creating an ideology of fear within the West and makes demands for high defence and security spending to counter the coming effects of relative pauperisation.

Fear amongst the old and propertied then affects the young populations of both the West (as the old become a dead weight of expenditures on the young) and the South (as its young start to press on the borders of the West from desperation).

Youthful resentments in the West and youthful desires for a better life outside the West make for a potentially volatile cocktail that must worry those who manage the wealth on which the older generations expect to rely for their pensions.

Two and a half thousand years after the destruction of Melos, we are still seeking to crush smaller players for profit and coating our passion for power with fine rhetoric and nonsense. Two thousand years after Spartacus, we are still puzzling on how to deal with the revolts of the damned.

[The quotations are adaptations from 'The Verso Book of Dissent', 2010 ]