Alan Johnson’s weekly column

Enormity and Self-Emancipation: A response to Norman Geras

In this week's column Alan Johnson discusses the balance that must be struck between the principle of self-emancipation - the long-standing socialist belief that the liberation of the oppressed must be the act of the oppressed themselves - and what he calls the 'duty to rescue', the humanitarian imperative to act immediately in situations of enormity and mass harm-doing. Alan is responding to a post written by the political philosopher, and blogger, Norman Geras.

Some opponents of the Iraq war, me included, spoke in these terms: ‘regime change is vital but it is a task for the Iraqi people acting for themselves and from below, not for the US and UK military, from above. Our job is to support the Iraqi people in this popular-democratic task’. Norman Geras has written a long post on his blog which, amongst other things, challenges the soundness of this ‘self-emancipation’ argument as a basis for opposing the war.

I will summarise Norman’s argument and then offer a response (I will only discuss this one aspect of the post, which I urge readers to read it in full).

Norman Geras’s Argument

The ‘primary choice structure’ in early 2003 was to support the war or to oppose the war. Though both choices involved uncertainties and mixed consequences the former certainly involved the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime while the latter its prolongation.

Some opponents of the war, unable to face the moral burden of their choice, opted for one or other version of a ‘get-out clause’ with which they could ‘protect themselves against the idea of having lent their efforts towards the survival of a regime like Saddam’s’. Each version of the ‘get-out clause’ claimed to support an alternative end to the regime rather than its prolongation.

The first version of the get out clause discussed by Norman – the only one I will discuss in this article, as it was mine - claimed to be working not for a prolongation of the Saddam regime but for an alternative way to get rid of that regime: the self-emancipation of the Iraqi people (or ‘regime change from below’, as some of us labelled our position at the time).

Now, Norman Geras, it should be said, has written more regularly and with greater power on the question of popular self-emancipation than most socialists. And he has done so across the fields of socialist theory and history, normative political philosophy, socialist organisation, and, in his marvellous essay on Trotsky’s prose, a kind of politico-literary criticism. There are few bodies of writing richer in the consideration of the place of self-emancipation in democratic and socialist theory and practice.

The history of socialism can be told as the history of a war between the principle of self-emancipation and various forms of socialist elitism. Any politics based on the manipulation of the mass of the people from above, by sentiment or by Wise Administrators, or The Party, must divide the world into two, manipulators and manipulated. The principle of self-emancipation - which was summed up by Marx as ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves - leaves sentimentalism behind at the same moment that the mass of the people become subjects not objects of change. Echoing Marx, the great US socialist Eugene Debs wrote “Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead them out of bondage. He has not come; he never will come. I would not lead you out if I could; for if you could be led out you could be led back again. I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing you can’t do for yourselves”.

Norman remains committed to the general principle of self-emancipation but is suggesting that we stop treating that principle as self-sufficient. In certain situations it is grossly inadequate as a basis for political judgement. Norman argues that while self-emancipation is without question ‘the best, the politically most fruitful and authoritative, kind of emancipation from oppression’ nonetheless, when it was applied to the pre-war situation in Iraq, it was ‘merely hand-waving’.

As I see it, Norman offers three kinds of reasons for rejecting the ‘self-emancipation’ argument for the case of Iraq in 2003 (the three terms used to characterise these reasons are mine not Norman’s).

First, social-scientific or evidence-based kinds of reasons. Self-emancipation was invoked by us ‘without any evidence whatever that such a process was imminent or, in truth, anywhere visible on the horizon’.

Second, ethical kinds of reasons (with some further social scientific judgements being implicated). Once ‘unfreedom and despotism’ reach a certain ‘threshold’ then it was ‘a cruel joke’ to invoke self-emancipation, a ‘terrible deadly kind of self-emancipation purism’.

Third – this an insight into the function that the self-emancipation argument served for the opponent of the war rather than a further reason to oppose that argument - psychological or psychoanalytic kinds of reasons. The function of such ‘self-emancipation’ talk, argues Norman, was not for the Iraqis but for the marchers. Its function was ‘distracting attention, especially their own, from what it was their marching and other agitation would have achieved had it prevailed’. In other words the self-emancipation argument was serving the ends of what Freud would call denial and repression. Talk of self-emancipation was a form of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment which facilitated the denial of a particularly painful aspect of the self, a manic defence against the inner significance of an experience, a form of repression of what could not be acknowledged. Now, I should say straight up that Norman does no more than make the basic point quoted, about ‘distraction’. The rest, the Freud talk, concerning which I doubt he would be very interested or sympathetic, is purely my extrapolation. But I do think the question of denial and repression is at stake here. Denial is now a mass phenomenon not only on the contemporary liberal-left but also on the right (witness Simon Jenkins, the man who wrote a column in the Times mocking Tony Bair for scaremongering about a non-existent terrorist threat…on the day of the Madrid bombing. And who, after an indecently short interval, has simply carried on writing the same column ever since).

Towards a response to Norman Geras

Each of these three arguments lays down a challenge to the self-emancipation left, has much truth to it, and, in toto, they bear the implication that the left needs to reformulate the self-emancipation argument for our times.

What follows are some thoughts ‘towards’ a reformulation, some initial points for discussion. We might respond to each reason at two levels: the merits of the general reformulations of the self-emancipation principle proffered, and the specific judgement on their application to Iraq in early 2003. My main interest is on the former, the general reformulations of the principle, which I think are important and true. Perhaps frustratingly I am going to be more vague about the specific judgement concerning Iraq. I claim there is, logically, not much alternative.

The Argument from evidence

This, to me, seems right. In situations of enormity and ongoing mass harm-doing the short-term is the relevant time frame. More precisely, while other longer time frames remain relevant, the duty to rescue dictates that the short term trumps all others. We might (I think should) remain convinced that only long-term solutions – I suggest global social democracy - can rip up the roots of mass harm-doing, and we might (I think absolutely should) carry on working for those long term goals. But Geras is telling us, I think, that we should stop counterposing that long term to the short term in situations in which ‘unfreedom and despotism’ have passed a certain ‘threshold’. We should stop pretending that talk about global social justice or environmental sustainability, or ‘world socialism’ is an answer for those targeted for death.

The question of time frame has political implications for the question of agency. The left is only beginning to emerge from a disastrous history so weakened that it does not represent a decisive force around which genuine alternative form of rescue could be organised in the short term. Agencies other then those of the left, agencies which the left will frequently find itself in bitter opposition to on many questions, from the environment to trade rules, debt relief to a women’s right to choose, will be the only viable short-term means to rescue the threatened as an enormity unfolds or to deal with certain threats.

This was the case during World War Two. Had the arguments of some socialists prevailed in 1940 (that this was ‘the Second Imperialist War’ - predatory on both sides, and so to be opposed by socialists in the name of anti-capitalism) then the Nazi death camps would certainly not have been liberated in 1945. Given even another two or three years to operate then the surviving third of European Jewry would have perished. The same logic applied to Rwanda. And to the Balkans. It applies today in Darfur. To continue talking of ultimate causes and working for ultimate solutions remains vital but not as a covert means to do nothing to rescue those targeted for death in the short term.

Is Norman right when he argues that there was ‘no evidence’ that self emancipation was possible in Iraq in the short or medium term? At the time, in early 2003 I said this to a school student walk out. “We are for regime change in Iraq. Now. But regime change from below, by the people. Not regime change from above by cruise missiles and cluster bombs. This is not pie in the sky. How did regime change happen in the old Latin American military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Brazil? Regime Change from Below by popular rebellion! How did regime change happen in the old Stalinist dictatorships? Regime Change from Below by popular rebellion!”

Was this hand waving? It was certainly optimistic, perhaps recklessly so, in retrospect. But then again, it is the case that when dictatorships crack they do so suddenly and in unpredictable ways. Subterranean tensions accumulate, hidden from view, especially to those outside that country, and then explode. The Argentina Generals did not look vulnerable either. It was also true that the Inspectors were in Baghdad (yes, only because the US Army was massed on the border, but in Baghdad they were). The League of Nations was not in Berlin in 1938 dismantling Panzers with the US army massed in France. And there were the voices of exiled Iraqi democrats and trade unionists who opposed the war (others supported it, for sure) arguing in more or less the same vein for regime change from below, enabled by measures of coercive containment from above. I did not feel myself at the time to be merely hand-waving. But I don’t know. And I am not sure, today, after one option has been closed off - so removing the basis on which we might know - what ‘knowing’ would look like.

The argument from Ethics

Norman argues that when despotism steps over a certain threshold then humanitarian intervention is justified. When genocide, crimes against humanity, and harm-doing at a certain threshold of scale and intensity is taking place then humanitarian-based reasons for intervention trump ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-war’ arguments. That ethical fact needs to be built into our theory and practice.

Again, Norman seems to me to be right here, and to have identified a real lacunae in socialist theory. We need an authentically and self-consciously left wing politics of humanitarian interventionism.

The problem in this regard is not, fundamentally the rampant and embarrassing anti-Americanism of the old left. Crass anti-Americanism is only the by-product of a deeper problem concerning the very categories of socialist theory. Developed in the late 19th century the categories of ‘Imperialism’, ‘anti-imperialism’, ‘revolutionary defeatism’, ‘revolutionary defencism’, ‘self-determination of nations’ – seem almost calculated to leave their bearers talking past situations of great enormity, distorting the realities on the ground (recall the rubbish written on the left about the Balkans!), and engaging in the kind of ‘cruel jokes’ that Geras criticises. As for the category of ‘barbarism’, it is, frankly, in this regard at least, useless; too large and all-embracing to be any kind of guide to our thinking about when or how to support humanitarian interventions; too much founded on a theory of inevitable capitalist collapse and death agony (the opposite of what has happened to that mode of production) to do service.

A pivotal moment for me in realising something was rotten with the existing socialist categories, that they were becoming the basis for ‘cruel jokes’, was an argument I had with a comrade about Rwanda. I was making the (banal, as I saw it) point that of course if we had had a crystal ball we would have favoured 2000 US Marines parachuting in to stop the genocide of 800,000 people. The comrade, shocked, replied, ‘no, we would not, we would never support US troops going anywhere, we remain irreconcilable opponents and the 800,000 dead would be a price worth paying for our political independence’.

Speaking for myself, things have never really stopped unravelling since the day of that argument. It has been just like Tom Paine said it would be. “It seldom happens that the mind rests satisfied with the simple detection of error or imposition. Once put in motion, that motion soon becomes accelerated; where it had intended to stop, it discovers new reasons to proceed, and renews and continues the pursuit far beyond the limits it first prescribed to itself (Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addresses on the Late Proclamation, 1792).

The author of The Rights of Man was talking, a little wishfully perhaps, about the people of England and their detection of the errors of the conservative Edmund Burke. Paine hoped that once they saw through Burke’s ‘incoherent rhapsodies and distorted facts’ about the horror of the French Revolution of 1789, then the people of England would move on naturally to ‘an enquiry into the first principles of government’ and the practical task of turning their country upside down.

The Rwanda argument put me in motion. Seeing through an ‘incoherent rhapsidy’ I changed my view about a ‘first principle’. It is best summed up by Sidney Hook. He argued, ‘At certain times and in respects to certain crucial issues, instead of saying "neither- nor" and looking for viable alternatives, we must recognize an "either-or" and take one stand or the other’. I used to think Hook was wrong, invoking the principle of self-emancipation. I now think Hook was right though I want to preserve an amended principle of self-emancipation (I do not agree, of course, with all the ‘stands’ the old Sidney Hook made, I am talking merely of his general formulation, that there are indeed times when neither/nor has to give way to either/or. There was nothing inevitable about his journey from that thought to supporting the Contras).

But valuable as it is this sensibility remains only that. We need categories able to grasp the dynamics realities of situations of enormity and mass harm-doing and guide our political response. Currently we even lack much of a sense of what these new categories would be. I would suggest three lines of thinking worth pursuing.

First, a ‘duty to rescue’ should be fought for by the left in the 21st century as we fought for labour rights in the 19th and the welfare state in the 20th.

Second, ‘democratiya’. Without dropping our support for democratic socialism, we must be plain: the idea, widespread on the left, that the presence of capitalist companies in Iraq is an evil comparable to the victory and return to power of the ba’athists or the victory of the Islamist Terrorists is obscene. It certainly has nothing to do with the thought of Karl Marx. The relevant divide today is between the democracy that will enable the maturation of the new labour movements and democratic movements - who may, later on, we hope, progress beyond capitalism - and various forms of totalitarianism. Democratiya and positive social reconstruction is the trelliswork on which the shoots of a better world will grow. Inchaote ‘anti-capitalist’ violence and nihilism is not.

Third, the careful decoupling of ‘self-determination’ from ‘national sovereignty’ in situations of the absence of democracy and the presence of enormity. During Milosovic’s long war on the non-Serbs Alice Mahon MP attacked the Kosovans for undermining the territorial sovereignty of Yugoslavia! And then there is the case of the Red Professor, Alex “Hullabaloo” Callinicos who defends a ba’athist-Islamist sectarian theocratic insurgency against the Iraqi people as a legitimate war of ‘self-determination’, sneering at the outcry at the torture and murder of the trade unionist and socialist Hadi Saleh by these killers as a ‘hullabaloo’ about a ‘communist’.

When you see idiocies of that order you know that the old categories are finished. In each case the actual self-determination of the actual people hinged on the defeat of the rhetorical claim – backed by arms - made by Milosovic and the ‘resistance’ to embody the unity of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’. In each case the left, in the shape of Mahon and “Hullabaloo”, ended up, after shuffling of the categories of ‘imperialism’ and ‘anti-imperialism’, backing those false claims. The plain truth is that the old categories are, more and more, in a changed world, putting the left, so to speak, ‘on the wrong side of the barricades’

The difficult question of the threshold

But was the Iraq of early 2003 a country that had passed the ‘threshold’ Norman writes of, such that war was warranted? Was there, in Iraq, the ‘certain conditions’ Sidney Hook writes of, such that neither/nor had to give way to either/or? This is where I am not yet persuaded.

(Norman makes the argument here)

This is what I argued when making a street corner speech in early 2003. “So we say make solidarity, give practical support, increase the inspectors, send in human rights monitors, tighten the military sanctions, but lift the economic sanctions which have caused according to the UN 500,000 deaths in Iraq since 1990. Lifting the economic sanctions and the people will be able to breathe again; the people will not be reliant upon the Saddam regime for food and so will begin to organise to overthrow Saddam”.

Again I am not persuaded this was just hand-waving. Yes, it was an optimism that bordered on the reckless but I was already moving away from a pure self-emancipation position, calling for more weapons inspectors, a tightening of military sanctions, UN human rights monitors, as well as practical solidarity. I was, I think, influenced by Michael Walzer’s notion of ‘coercive containment’, though I can’t recall if I had read Walzer’s position at that point or developed a similar notion independently. Anyway, the perspective depended on a combination of ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ thrusts to topple Saddam without the war that we feared would kill, not as its intention but as its unintentional consequence, many many thousands of Iraqi civilians, as it has. I think that the ‘coercive containment’ perspective could well have developed over time into a more multilateral and internationally understood military effort to remove Saddam (and these are not small considerations in the context of the war on terror).

Again we can try to separate the specific judgement about Iraq in early 2003 from the general principle. The important point, I think, is that Geras has identified what the decent left should be debating: what is the threshold when; what are the conditions under which; what are the criteria by which interventions can be judged; what normative principles and evidentiary bases should guide such judgements; what national and international institutional mechanisms might enable this notion of a humanitarian threshold to take on real practical import? If we could stop buying books by Michael (‘There is no Terrorist threat’, ‘The Resistance are just like the Minutemen’) Moore and start seriously discussing those questions the left might do better.

So what is to be done about self-emancipation?

Self-emancipation can only develop as a political process in real political time and that means in the given circumstances and given balance of political forces. The maturation of a new organised working class and democratic movement over decades is the only serious and sober perspective around which a new decent left can be built. In Iraq that meant using the breathing space offered by the coalition, for now, to build up the progressive political forces that would be capable of sustaining a politics of self-emancipation (trade unions, democratic parties, women’s groups, a free press), to wrap this new force in a blanket of international solidarity and to support the spread of democratiya throughout the region. That perspective has, I think, been spectacularly vindicated in recent weeks.

We can only preserve an (amended) version of the perspective of self-emancipation in our time by seeing plain that there are two versions of self-emancipation - the propagandistic and the political.

The propagandist type lives a time of perpetual futurity when present day actualities are denied, bracketed, or obscured in favour of the shiny future vision. No tough political choices ever have to be made and certainly no compromises. At its best this kind of self-emancipation purism holds open a space for a future socialist alternative. But the price is high: an abstract propagandism, an inability to relate the values of the left to present-day realities, the loss of our capacity to act as a fructifying political lever.

The political type wants to be a political lever doing the difficult and messy work of building an alliance of democratic and progressive political forces in a situation of extreme weakness, attending urgently to what we might call ‘real political time’, developing a political programme by its lights.

The perspective of the maturation of a democratic and progressive movement through the fight for reforms is not glamorous. But it is positive, it is based on self-activity, and it is based on values. As such it is an alternative to the inchoate negative ‘anti-ism’, the smart-alec sneering, and the cult of violence that passes for a left today. For those who would take it is a route out of the cul-de-sac into which the old leaders and new comedians have driven them. And it gives us a fixed firm point of critical distance from the forces with which we may well have to extend critical support but to which we do not and should not extend political trust.