The Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left

van der Pijl on tricks of the imperialist trade 
 
(I think this author has done as much to bring a nuanced class analysis to
the poli-sci subdiscipline of international relations as anyone; see esp.
his 1984 "The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class" [Verso] which is
exceptionally good. Seems to me that the punchline that is most applicable
to broader issues of social justice in SA -- albeit not anti-war sentiment,
for other reasons -- goes like this: "the remarkable melt-down of the Left
in the case of NATO's war against Yugoslavia, a process already heralded by
the weak response to the Western attack on Iraq in 1991, in my view can only
be understood if we analyse the rise of the managerial cadre in advanced
capitalist society, which finds its privileged expression in Social
Democracy, but even less hampered by tradition, in the various Green
formations. The Communists have either given up altogether in the wake of
the Soviet collapse, or have survived in name only. As a cadre entrusted
with the day-to-day management of politics and administration, the
'political class' of each state is an internally cohesive force, and the
particular sources of the entitlement to occupy state management posts such
as the class struggle of the labour movement, have increasingly been left
behind by that part of the cadre which entered politics as representatives
of the working class aspirations for socialism.")......Patrick Bond.

http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/212vanderpijl.htm

----------------------

Kees van der Pijl

The Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left

Contents:

  a.. The Aesthetics of Capitalist Geopolitics
  b.. De-Legitimising Non-Western Existence - The New Barbarians
  c.. The New Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left
Kees van der Pijl, International Relations and Politics, University of
Sussex k.van-der-pijl@sussex.ac.uk

The 'War on Terrorism' launched by the United States after the suicide
attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September, 2001, builds on a
longer history of international confrontation and pressure and more
specifically, on a series of postures which have been adopted by the West
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These postures have included ethical
foreign policy, humanitarian intervention, and peace enforcement. They are
all part of the quest for a coherent, post-cold war global strategy on the
part of the neo-liberal, Atlantic core of the international state system. As
I have argued elsewhere (van der Pijl, 1998: ch. 3), capital has
historically crystallised in an English-speaking 'heartland', from which it
continues to radiate, overlaying the transnationalisation of capital from
other centres such as East Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America. In this
heartland, the capitalist class is most firmly rooted and it is from this
core that it organises its transnational class alliances across the globe.
Certainly in the recent period, fractures have appeared in the effort to
multilateralise US global strategy by straight pressure and the
'international community' seems to have narrowed down again to the United
States and Britain. But the basic premise that it is 'ethical' to wage war
against sovereign peoples for their own good, or that whatever the cost to
the civilian population, an embargo can be imposed on a nation for political
reasons, remains widely accepted. The systemic requirement for a continued
growth of capitalism and the deepening of its discipline over society and
nature on a world scale, in the end ties the fate of the global capitalist
class to the continued ability of the US-led 'West' to project its power
world-wide.

The unification of global space under Western hegemony and under capitalist
discipline has reached a stage where no separate trajectories of social
development can be allowed to persist. As Mark Duffield argues in a seminal
study, the Western approach towards the outside world is no longer inspired
by a concern to aid indigenous processes of development, but to impose, if
need be by force, the Western social model altogether (Duffield, 2001). Or,
as Dan Plesch puts it in a newspaper comment entitled 'Iraq first, Iran and
China next' (Guardian, 13 September, 2002), 'President Bush's concern over
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is a pretext for a global strategy of
pre-emptive attack. He and his advisers intend to establish precedents with
Iraq that can be used against other states that stand out against US global
control.' In hindsight, the Kosovo war against Yugoslavia also fits this
pattern, and in the figure of Milosevic, the elements of embargo, the rise
of a criminal economy and a new class associated with it, the demonisation
of a defiant leader(ship), punitive war, the re-making of the target
society, and the final celebration of 'international justice' in a
show-trial, all come together. Certainly the defiant leader may be a crook
or worse, but it is rather his failure to be 'our' crook that he is put to
task for.

The interventionism by the self-styled international community, although
paraded as 'ethical' by leaders such as Clinton and Blair is an
aestheticisation, an embellishment, of the sustained attack by the West on
the remaining elements of non-conformity with neo-liberal global
capitalism-just as 'freedom and democracy', 'human rights', or 'deterrence'
were aesthetic labels pasted on a strategy of strangulation applied to the
Soviet Union. The 'War on Terrorism' is merely the unilateral, militarised
version of this interventionism. The neo-liberal counter-revolution against
the class and international achievements of reformist and revolutionary
forces which had gained strength in the 1970s, after the collapse of the
USSR has been geared to a new, quasi-imperial aesthetics of righteous power
by which the 'civilised' world may discipline the 'barbarians' who refuse to
comply with the directives addressed to them. Confronting the 'civilised'
realm are a range of ultimately illegitimate alternatives, some worse than
others, from which evil may spring and reach out to us. Clearly the
murderous attacks of September 11 gave ample proof that this view of the
world is superficially correct. And whilst the 'war on terrorism' goes
beyond the assumptions of mere ethical foreign policy and peace enforcement,
it taps into the same root of self-righteousness. To construct evil in this
way, though, it must be abstracted from history, so that its sources, which
almost always reside in previous episodes of Western involvement, can be
ignored and responsibilities left non-addressed (Kolko, 2002).

The Aesthetics of Capitalist Geopolitics

To highlight the new quasi-imperial aesthetics which I argue underscores
Western hegemony in the contemporary world, I will distinguish between the
actual ethical aspect of policy or of social situations-as Klaus-Gerd Giesen
has shown, every policy, e.g. narrow power realism, too, has an ethical
aspect (Giesen, 1992); and a purported ethics, as in 'ethical foreign policy
' distinguished from a supposedly un-ethical foreign policy. In that case,
we are not speaking of ethics but of aesthetics.

As David Harvey argues (1985: 108-9), state authority cannot be legitimated
entirely on account of its practical functions in the reproduction of a
particular social order. Under contemporary capitalist relations,
specifically, the state has to mythologise itself anew, because its actual
functions are too technical to inspire the deeper sense of belonging on
which earlier types of society relied to legitimate state authority. More
specifically, capitalist society today is a transnational society, in which
exploitation occurs, and classes form, along lines of gravitation that run
across boundaries and therefore involve several states nominally sovereign.
The mythology of political authority in contemporary capitalist society
therefore must account for systematic foreign involvement, necessary for
protecting the transnationalised circuit of capital and the fractions of the
capitalist class active in it. Expansion from the original, English-speaking
heartland, itself grafted on the crusades and the voyages of discovery,
bequeathed the Christian civilisation/heathen barbarity dichotomy, which
through its further history, structured the mental appropriation and
theoretical elaboration of relations between the West and non-Western
societies (cf. Jahn, 2000). In the post-cold war context, this dichotomy has
been subtly mutated again, because every hegemonic strategy has to build on
the available foundation of attitudes and dispositions in the wider
population if it is to be effective.

Today, the missionary ideology constructed around the civilisation/barbarity
dichotomy must satisfy the tastes of a Western public which has developed a
specific set of sensibilities under conditions of sustained abundance and
images of abundance. Cultural permissiveness, the freedom to consume and
travel, and unfamiliarity with any direct experience of violence and
oppression (to mention a few constitutive elements only), add up to a
particular mental substratum on which an idealised way of life, which is the
good life, can comfortably rest. This ideal is being continuously recycled
by the media and politicians and held up before us as the only legitimate
form of existence. Being poor is no longer just a condition that is
deplorable, let alone something for which the West might bear any
responsibility, but proof of the failure of a society to organise itself
like a rich society and with the rich societies-to be culturally permissive,
to allow freedom of consumption and travel, etcetera-brief, to be like us.

When the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by a systematic weakening
of states which only had been in control of their societies by virtue of the
cold war, indeed by a trail of state collapse, the cry for Western
involvement mounted along with the penetration of capital in countries
previously closed to it, because often, violence of a very primitive kind,
using machetes and clubs rather than B-52s, proved particularly offensive to
people whose upper limit of sensitivity to violence has been set by the
falling over of a TV actor playing dead by a bullet. Sights of real blood on
TV in Somalia or Yugoslavia only confirmed a basic prejudice that 'we' have
left such barbarity behind us, and therefore should rush in to restore
order; which if it required violence, would still leave 'us' on a higher
moral plane-that of civilisation. After all, 'murdering Gaels, or
foreigners, or Red Indians,. was patriotic, heroic, and just, whereas to
defend yourself and your way of life against the advancing forces of
English-speaking empire showed human nature at its worst and most bestial'
(Calder, 1981: 36).

The label 'ethical' for this involvement (ethical referring to the quest for
the good), when used as a claim made on behalf of those who pursue the
foreign involvement, actually must be read as 'aesthetical' (the quest for
the beautiful) because it consciously deals with the appearance of things.
It is a construction, rather than one out of a set of inherent qualities. In
a discussion of different definitions of aesthetics, Borev concludes that
what we experience as beautiful, is related to our capacity to control. We
experience the beauty of nature only to the degree it has been appropriated
socially in the labour process; in the fullness of collective and individual
experience, we are willing to meditate on certain universal qualities of
natural objects, while objectifying, that is, appropriating them socially.
We experience pleasure by the mere contemplation of our own powers. Nature
as it were becomes magnificent in the mirror of our own capacity to change
it-to the point where we can enjoy without immediately exerting these
powers. The connection with an aestheticisation of politics by calling it
'ethical', I would infer, resides in the 'enjoyment' of being on the side of
the good defined as the controlling side; whilst on the opposite side is raw
nature, which we in principle control, but which is 'barbarian',
uncivilised, in one way or another. In Borev's words,

    Assessing the various phenomena aesthetically, man establishes the
degree of his supremacy over the world. This degree is determined by the
level and nature of the development of society and its production. The
latter reveals the universal significance of the natural properties of
objects and defines their aesthetic characteristics (Borev, 1985: 42).

During NATO's Kosovo war in the spring of 1999, Jamie Shea, the spokesman
for the alliance, bragged that NATO, by releasing showers of tiny aluminium
strips on power plants, could switch the electricity supply of Serbia on and
off at will. This is an example of how the might of the West was used in
this conflict not just as blind destruction but, in a way that was itself
inspiring awe, by playing with the electricity switch and showing 'restraint
' as a means of demonstrating a far greater power, and civilisation at the
same time. Of course, the so-called collateral damage, such as the
cluster-bombing of civilian columns, or the attacks on the Belgrade TV
studios or the Chinese embassy, were not to the same degree able to convey
this aesthetic enjoyment.

But the aesthetics of power, to the degree it was effective, did serve to
construct a mythology of authority for the NATO bloc which helped its
forward march into Central and Eastern Europe (and on to Central Asia, as I
have argued elsewhere, cf. van der Pijl, 2001). The pressing forward of the
boundary of civilisation requires an element of consent which cannot be
expected from the destructive use of power alone. This in fact is also a
liability in the current 'war on terrorism'. For Western-style 'polyarchy'
(elite circulation through limited party competition) to function in a
forward strategy, a legitimacy must be created of which at least one
political formation, in practice the political formation of the aspiring
transnational capitalist class in the zone of advance, makes itself the
representative. Only then, hegemonic integration can occur (Robinson, 1996).

De-Legitimising Non-Western Existence. The New Barbarians

Fukuyama's thesis on the 'End of History' proclaimed in 1989 continues to be
the most significant statement of the ideology of globalisation. There is no
need to go into the problematic, even fraudulent concoction of Hegelian
rationalism and the triumph of possessive individualism claimed by Fukuyama.
What is important is that the universalisms of the prior period, the truly
planetary ethics that in all its different varieties animated the student
and black movements, the Third World coalitions behind a New International
Economic Order monitored by the UN, and the peace moment finally resonating
in Gorbachev's proposals for a global 'historic compromise', all have been
abandoned. Fukuyama instead proclaimed the differentiation between
states/societies which have reached the finite 'global' stage of
civilisation (liberal capitalism plus parliamentary democracy); and states
'mired in history'. Fukuyama, too, recognises common,
sovereignty-transcending processes and imperatives, but claims they affect
two categories of states differently, indeed defines these two
categories-one, the universal homogeneous state of the triumphant West, and
two, those states outside the West, not yet included in it but faced with
the necessity to adopt the Western package of parliamentary democracy and
neo-liberal economics now that the great historical alternatives to it,
lastly state socialism, have collapsed.

This discourse constituted the ideological background of the proclamation of
the New World Order by Bush Sr., which was the next step from the
confrontational 'freedom' drive under Reagan and Thatcher, and beyond to the
identification of the 'Axis of Evil' by Bush, Jr. Whereas Gorbachev still
claimed that to obtain the real universality necessary to take up the
planetary responsibilities of human survival, the forces of imperialism had
to be neutralised; the End of History/Axis of Evil line of thinking on the
contrary argues that for the world to reach its definitive form in terms of
civilisation, the burden of adaptation is reversed. It is necessary instead
to neutralise the states 'mired in history' as potential rabble-rousers, the
'rogue states' beyond the pale. The normative thrust, too, is entirely
reversed compared to the prior period in which Western capitalism found
itself embattled. From attacking exploitation, unequal exchange, militarism,
imperialism, and cultural degradation with their epicentre in the West, the
Fukuyama argument holds that with the end of the Cold War, the preparation
for war to defend freedom against dictatorship can shift to policing the
remaining pockets of non-integration. This view warrants that while inside
the post-historic world, the new norms that the modern world requires, such
as peaceful settlement of conflict and other instances of civilisation
(including of course, 'market economy'), have been achieved; these norms do
not prevail outside this sphere. The criteria are simple: allowing a free
rein to private capital ('market economy') and 'democracy' (holding
elections is the only criterion). In both cases, what is secured through
meeting these two criteria, is the legitimate involvement and presence of
the West in other societies, economically and politically, suspending their
'otherness' in these respects. Crucial, though, is the de-legitimation of
existence outside the orbit of the West.

Beginning with the view of the Soviet 'evil empire' as a barbarian anomaly
fostering terrorism all over the globe, the hegemonic discourse in the West
was geared to a normative differentiation between the West itself and the
world not conforming to Western norms. The implication of this attitude that
we represent civilisation ('the international community') whereas the others
lead an existence which is historically meaningless and ultimately
illegitimate, of course has a long pedigree. It effectively provides the
moral grounds for imposing our will without reservations on the natives,
which we have first dehumanised, as Toynbee says, by considering them as
part of the local 'flora and fauna'. Of course, German history has added its
own gruesome chapter to this de-humanisation of the 'other', but it is as
important for understanding contemporary world affairs to see that the
English-speaking heartland was founded on ideas of a 'chosen people' who
made short shrift with any native populations they encountered-both on the
British Isles and in the lands of overseas settlement (Toynbee, 1935, 1:
211-2, 465).

The morality of the new cold war launched by Thatcher and Reagan was
definitely rooted in this preconception. Under Reagan, the tension ignited
by his predecessor and his European friends led by Helmut Schmidt, was
raised to a new level with declarations by top Reagan advisers such as
Richard Pipes that the USSR should change its system or face war. At the
same time, under the Reagan Doctrine, counter-guerrilla wars of extreme
brutality were launched, of which the one in Mozambique was perhaps the
worst of all in terms of killing and maiming, but of which the Afghan jihad
against the Communist government and the Soviet occupation meanwhile
deserves pride of place in terms of its longer-term political consequences.
With US proxies thus encouraged to engage in a systematic slaughter of their
kin, a view was fostered that those who do not conform willingly to our
norms, are outside civilisation itself; and that one can impose one's will
on them without moral restraint. The proxies of course were mobilised
against the authoritarian imposition of the Soviet version of modern
rationality, which in the end is only a variety of modernity throughout;
they were encouraged to activate any sentiment that could bring their men to
fight. As Dick Boer has argued, the USSR's collapse implied the
disappearance of a countermovement against capitalism which yet was part of
'modernity'-in the sense that it did not reject the insights and
achievements of Enlightenment but rather their perversion in late-bourgeois
society. Socialism confronted capitalism with its own programme: freedom,
equality, and fraternity. Gorbachev's final attempt to reach out to the West
and achieve a historic compromise between capitalism and socialism in light
of the threat to humanity's survival on the planet, Boer notes, failed
because for the West, confident of its power relative to a weakened
adversary, there was no need to accept such a compromise.

    Since for the actual countermovement, an appeal to the ideals of the
Enlightenment itself has become a totally frustrated enterprise, terrorism
is the "solution" to which the "free world", claiming all reason for itself,
compels. The opponents of the inhumanity of our "free world" turn into the
barbarians we have made out of them: the irrationality of our rationality
drives them to madness. And this barbarity is then ascribed to them as their
"essence" (Boer, 1991: 18)

When these lines were written, the West had triumphed, but on the fringes of
its sphere of influence, with 'globalisation' only just offering itself as
an option, neo-liberal capitalism was still confronted with the proxies it
had recruited in the effort. Of these barbarian proxies, Bin Laden has
meanwhile achieved world notoriety, and Boer's prescient comments throw
light on the withdrawal from universalism which characterises the current
stage of the Third World revolt and on which the Bin Laden network draws.
There were also proxies which remained, as state classes, committed to
Western values of private enrichment, instrumental rationality, etc., and
they were actually mobilised, qua states, to stem the tide of irrational
barbarity rising against the West-Iraq against the Iran of the ayatollahs
being the case in point.

In Rufin's L'Empire et les nouveaux barbares (like Boer's analysis, of
1991), it is this role of proxy states as buffers against barbarity that is
central in the analysis. Rufin sees the 'New World Order' announced by Bush
Sr. after the victory over Saddam Hussein's forces in the Gulf War, along
the lines of the old Roman empire. There is a civilised core, the empire; an
outer barbarian arena; and buffer states on the boundary line, the limes. On
this frontier, which as we know from other historical empires, is a zone
rather than a line, the barbarian forces encounter the limits of the
imperial ones. Wars, according to Rufin, are mainly conducted to
contest/establish the status of buffer states situated along the limes. In
this light, both the war over Kuwait, between the US-led 'empire' and Iraq,
and the war over Kosovo between NATO and rump-Yugoslavia, are examples of
such borderline wars in Rufin's argument. That the 'empire' is morally and
ethically superior to the barbarians, is a foregone conclusion. This is
expressed in many ways, for instance in the unquestioned assumption that it
is always the West which sends 'monitors' to observe whether elections in
non-Western states are held according to the rules. Certainly it would cause
a stir if Kampuchean or Zambian observers would appear in Florida to
investigate the financing and conditions of, say, the US Presidential
elections. Since 'justice' likewise can only be a characteristic of the
empire and not of the barbarians, it can be applied only in a one-way
direction.

The New Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left

The imperial theme has been popularised recently in Hardt and Negri's Empire
(2000), but from this empire, all politics has been removed by the failure
to understand the international relations involved, and by the stark absence
of any class analysis. In the end, what remains is a literary hyperbole,
which obscures the competitive, disruptive aspects of the discipline of
capital both on its geopolitical substratum (the rivalries among
transnational fractions of the ruling class operating from different states,
within and beyond the original heartland); and on the class structure of
contemporary capitalism. On this dimension, there is no longer just the
straight confrontation between the propertied ruling class and a
proletariat, 'the multitude' in Hardt and Negri's parlance; in between, as I
argue in chapter 5 of my Transnational Classes and International Relations
(1998) there has arisen, in the course of the 20th century, a managerial
cadre class with the potential to steer society away from its subordination
to capital, if the balance of social forces or the survival conditions of
society per se, compel it to do so. The anti-globalisation movement and the
wide resonance it has achieved since Seattle have scattered the
self-evidence of the global unification of capitalist discipline to a degree
which is once again (as happened in the 1930s and 1970s) undermining the
loyalty to the ruling class of at least a segment of the cadre.

The question of the legitimacy of war against 'barbarians' and against
barbarian practices, is of crucial importance for deciding whether the
issues raised by the anti-globalisation movement (privatisation of the
'global commons', over-consumption, exhaustion of the social and natural
substratum of human existence) will be turned into a comprehensive political
programme. The origins of the paradox between the purported ethics of
contemporary globalisation as the harbinger of freedom and democracy and the
reality of criminal coercion, have to be exposed in order not to be caught
up in a debate on economics. The pre-emptive wars waged or contemplated
against the remaining non-integrated, non-Western societies, wars which in a
sense try to violently remove the accumulated contradictions which result
from a century of Western involvement, are not just an aberration from what
otherwise would be rational 'global governance'. They are an attempt to
aestheticise globalisation as an ethical project for which we must be
willing to fight. There is perhaps even an element of mobilising the
widespread resistance and disgust provoked by misery and repression per se,
against the victims locked in their own miserable and repressive outposts,
and so turn war into 'liberation' also for us-not unlike German socialists
in 1914 were mobilised against the autocracy of the Czar, the French
socialists against the authoritarianism of the Reich. Without the
ideological component of 'just war', the globalisation project will lack the
energies it can only draw from a mass base, and the Kosovo war again stands
as a measure of how far, if given the impetus of a righteous crusade, the
West can penetrate in one relatively minor conflict of this type.

The Western approach, theorised by Fukuyama, and later hardened into
Huntington's clash of civilisations thesis (with its echoes of Carl Schmitt
if not of the actual Nazi geopolitical school of Haushofer and Fried), is
not for global community but for Western community, with insiders and
outsiders, and the right to go to war against the outsiders because they are
outsiders is implicit in it. The origins of this go back to the
transformation of England from an absolutist monarchy to a capitalist state
in the civil war and the Glorious Revolution, when its attitude in world
politics shifted from dynastic entanglements to calculated gain (Teschke,
2002). One consequence of English expansion through overseas settlement was
the creation, certainly through rivalry and conflict, of a core group of
states among whom war was no longer an option-the foedus pacificum of Kant's
peace project, or what I call the Lockean heartland. Kant's project, like
Locke's, was based on the notion of a social contract-in Kant's case, one at
the international level, among republics, 'democracies'. In contemporary
Western liberal thought, this idea is self-consciously carried forward, as
e.g. by John Rawls in Theory of Justice (1973: 11). From that work, it is
not difficult to gauge that the just society is the liberal, Western one, so
that by implication, there is an outside world where justice is lacking.
However, in his later work, as Giesen demonstrates, Rawls also gives his
general liberal argument an imperial inflection. In Political Liberalism and
an article 'The Law of Peoples', both of 1993, Rawls proposes an
intermediary zone, a grey area, which may be compared to Rufin's 'borderline
states'. Thus three concentric circles are delineated: the inner circle of
states adhering to political liberalism and justice; a second rung of
'well-ordered hierarchical regimes' which are allied to the former; and
'outlaw regimes', the 'rogue states' of the contemporary period (Giesen,
1999: 44). The three categories are basically defined by their observance of
political human rights. The second-circle regimes must minimally respect
certain human rights, in addition to being legitimate in the eyes of their
own people and behave in a peaceful and non-expansionist way. This
distinguishes them from the outlaw regimes. An important criterion is also
the respect of private property. Thus a state which does not respect private
property is an outlaw regime, whereas a state which for instance violates
the freedom of expression or association but respects private property, can
belong to the second circle (Giesen, 1999: 46). Rawls then claims the right
for the liberal states to 'punish' the outlaw regimes by economic measures
or by force for their non-observance of rights. Whereas Kant did not
recognise the right to intervene militarily, punitive war is a clear option
for Rawls. In Rawls's view, 'justice' can only apply to the political sphere
(it includes the right to private property, though). The economic sphere on
the other hand is neutral, and cannot be understood in terms of justice.
Thus while private property is a human right, its consequences for the
economy are not within the sphere of human rights.

Rawls's considerations on the ethics of intervention may be brushed aside as
a scholastic exercise which need not detain us too long. But they symbolise,
as does his Theory of Justice, the quest for a moral justification of our
society as the ultimate achievement in terms of justice and ethics, the need
for the aestheticisation of our existence in Western society. Fukuyama
specifies the grounds for the illegitimacy of non-Western existence, after
which the field is open for the re-making of that part of the world in 'our'
image-a chorus in which Rawls then becomes only one among many voices. The
self-styled 'international community' after having denigrated the UN and
international law for more than twenty years as part of the neo-liberal
counterrevolution, has firmly grasped the exclusive right to force even if
this is diluted by dispensations given to, say, Russia in Chechnya, when the
tactics of gaining a free hand elsewhere require it. Moral internationalism
rather than upholding the rules that alone can prevent or limit war, has
become the defining element in the Western consensus.

The question that arises, and with which I conclude, is: Why has the Left as
an established political force, lost its bearings, and has it allowed itself
to be drawn along into the vortex of imperial globalisation? Clearly, a wide
chasm has opened up between the nomads of the anti-globalisation movement
and the Left parties within their respective states-the Social Democrats,
the Greens, and the Communists. I would argue, within the limits of a brief
and tentative conclusion, that there are two different reasons for this. One
has to do with generations-the anti-globalisation movement (which of course
is in reality a true 'globalisation' movement) is a youth movement. This
generation of students and the young generally, has come of age in the
post-cold war context and perceives issues globally, in a world context.
That tendency in the youth movement which wants to express itself beyond
dancing, and which has a social conscience, articulates its solidarity with
the dispossessed in the global context for the simple reason that there are
no longer two worlds and one which has not yet made up its mind. Little
needs to be said to argue this, because it strikes me as completely
self-evident. The preserve of the Third World solidarity committees of the
recent past-the Nicaragua and Angola committees, the Vietnam movement etc.,
etc., has been opened up by capitalist globalisation and a Left
consciousness attaches itself no longer to the particular projects of
aspiring state classes with or without Soviet support, but
straightforwardly, as an opposition in its own right, to the cause of social
justice and emancipation, survival and peace on a world scale.

The second reason why the anti-globalisers and the established Left have
parted ways allowing the latter to be mopped up by the mobilisation of
consent for punitive war, is one of functionality. Indeed the remarkable
melt-down of the Left in the case of NATO's war against Yugoslavia, a
process already heralded by the weak response to the Western attack on Iraq
in 1991, in my view can only be understood if we analyse the rise of the
managerial cadre in advanced capitalist society, which finds its privileged
expression in Social Democracy, but even less hampered by tradition, in the
various Green formations. The Communists have either given up altogether in
the wake of the Soviet collapse, or have survived in name only. As a cadre
entrusted with the day-to-day management of politics and administration, the
'political class' of each state is an internally cohesive force, and the
particular sources of the entitlement to occupy state management posts such
as the class struggle of the labour movement, have increasingly been left
behind by that part of the cadre which entered politics as representatives
of the working class aspirations for socialism.

One aspect of the mental state and practical disposition of the cadre is
their capacity to serve under different masters. A manager in the sphere of
intellectual activity (and managing knowledge workers or managing the
political-administrative sphere are not different here) cannot enter his or
her function with a strong commitment to a single world-view. Flexibility
and the willingness to apply ideas as if they were 'tools', is a
precondition for this strand of cadre to function, and the Left in state
politics has been trained to do precisely this for the entire post-war
period, but increasingly so in the most recent period. Post-modern thought
with its awareness of multiple realities and scepticism towards
comprehensive theorisations, has emancipatory as well as
functional-disciplining effects in this respect. Foucault's archaeology of
knowledge is particularly relevant here, because it makes claims to truth
relative, arguing that every system of knowledge defines anew what is true
and what is false. Lyotard, with his scepticism towards 'grand narratives',
in his famous report on higher education writes that 'the transmission of
knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of leading the
nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players
capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required
by its institutions' (Lyotard, 1984: 48).

Such an attitude to knowledge, whilst containing emancipatory elements as
well, also dovetails with its commodification and commercialisation, and as
Giesen notes, it is this trend which also has penetrated the sphere of
ethics. There has occurred a shift to an applied ethics, in which ethical
questions are approached eclectically with an eye to their use-ethics are
even called 'variables', to be handled by experts in ethical questions
(Giesen, 1992: 302). 'Applied ethics' continues to enjoy considerable
success beyond the limits of traditional philosophy.

    Having become "experts in ethical questions", the philosophers, happy to
be able-finally!-to render service to the collectivity, to be finally useful
for something, joyfully apply their analytical tools to moral cases in every
field. They teach (in the United States) in schools of medicine, law,
journalism, economics, and recently also in political science; they are
active in hospitals, corporations, and, as consultants, set up clinics
analogous to those of psychologists and psychoanalysts to aid their clients
in "thinking" their moral problem (Giesen, 1992: 305).

To perform this function, however, the experts need an ethics that is
completely malleable, they cannot be seen to be sticking to one particular
position any longer. It is here that post-modernism emerges as the general
framework to cover an applied ethics for any situation that may arise
(Giesen, 1992: 307). The professional politicians who notwithstanding their
historical affiliations with the Left, proved willing to melt into the
consensus supporting punitive war against non-compliant outsider states, in
my view are subject to the same process of developing the malleable mind
without which they would not be able to survive as political cadre in the
present global context. The aestheticisation of quasi-imperial world
politics is grafted on this instrumentalisation of ethics. Only in this way
can the glaring contradictions of humanitarian war, embargo for democracy,
etc. be explained. This rise of a neo-liberal cadre especially in the sphere
of the former Left, and their take-over of its political formations (New
Labour etc.) have created not only the apparatus for the application of the
new ethics and its aestheticisation by spin doctors and intellectual experts
alike, but also a mass basis-at least as long as the newly emerged
anti-globalisation movement will be kept at bay.

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