moishe postone - history and helplessness

8/7/2019 Moishe Postone - History and Helplessness

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History and Helplessness:

Mass Mobilization and Contemporary

Forms of Anticapitalism

Moishe Postone

As is well known, the period since the early 1970s hasbeen one o massive historical structural transormations o the global order, re-

quently reerred to as the transition rom Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better,

rom Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism). This transorma-tion o social, economic, and cultural lie, which has entailed the undermining

o the state-centric order o the mid twentieth century, has been as undamental

as the earlier transition rom nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the state-

interventionist, bureaucratic orms o the twentieth century.

These processes have entailed ar-reaching changes in not only Western capi-

talist countries but communist countries as well, and led to the collapse o the

Soviet Union and European communism in addition to undamental transorma-

tions in China. Consequently, they have been interpreted as marking the end o

Marxism and o the theoretical relevance o Marxs critical theory. And yet these

processes o historical transormation have also reasserted the central importance

o historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. This problematic, which

is at the heart o Marxs critical theory, is precisely that which eludes the grasp o

the major theories o the immediate post-Fordist era those o Michel Foucault,

Jacques Derrida, and Jrgen Habermas. Recent transormations have revealed

those theories to have been retrospective, ocused critically on the Fordist era, butno longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world.

Emphasizing the problematic o historical dynamics and transormations

Public Culture 18:1

2006 by Duke University Press

I would like to thank Mark Loeer, Claudio Lomnitz, and Bill Sewell or very helpul critical

comments.

a n t i c a p i t a l i s m , x e n o p h o b i a , i m p e r i a l i s m


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casts a dierent light on a number o important issues. In this essay I begin to

address general questions o internationalism and political mobilization todayin relation to the massive historical changes o the past three decades. Beore

doing so, however, I shall briey touch upon several other important issues that

become inected dierently when considered against the background o recent

overarching historical transormations: the question o the relation o democracy

to capitalism and its possible historical negation more generally, o the relation

o historical contingency (and, hence, politics) to necessity and the question o

the historical character o Soviet communism.

The structural transormations o recent decades have entailed the reversal o

what had appeared to be a logic o increasing state-centrism. They thereby call into

question linear notions o historical development whether Marxist or Weberian.

Nevertheless, large-scale historical patterns o the long twentieth century, such

as the rise o Fordism out o the crisis o nineteenth-century liberal capitalism

and the more recent demise o the Fordist synthesis, suggest that an overarching

pattern o historical development does exist in capitalism. This implies, in turn,

that the scope o historical contingency is constrained by that orm o social lie.Politics alone, such as the dierences between conservative and social democratic

governments, cannot explain why, or example, regimes everywhere in the West,

regardless o the party in power, deepened and expanded welare state institutions

in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, only to cut back such programs and structures

in subsequent decades. There have been dierences between various governments

policies, o course, but they have been dierences in degree rather than in kind.

Such large-scale historical patterns, I would argue, are ultimately rooted in the

dynamics o capital and have been largely overlooked in discussions o democ-

racy as well as in debates on the merits o social coordination by planning versus

that eected by markets. These historical patterns imply a degree o constraint,

o historical necessity. Yet attempting to come to grips with this sort o neces-

sity need not reiy it. One o Marxs important contributions was to provide a

historically specifc grounding or such necessity, that is, or large-scale patterns

o capitalist development, in determinate orms o social practice expressed by

categories such as commodity and capital. In so doing, Marx grasped such pat-terns as expressions o historically specifc orms o heteronomy that constrain

the scope o political decisions and, hence, o democracy. His analysis implies

that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming the limits to democratic

politics that result rom systemically grounded exploitation and inequality; it also

entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expand-

ing the realm o historical contingency and, relatedly, the horizon o politics.


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To the degree we choose to use indeterminacy as a critical social category,

then, it should be as a goal o social and political action rather than as an onto-logical characteristic o social lie. (The latter is how it tends to be presented in

poststructuralist thought, which can be regarded as a reifed response to a reifed

understanding o historical necessity.) Positions that ontologize historical inde-

terminacy emphasize that reedom and contingency are related. However, they

overlook the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a structuring orm

o social lie and are, or this reason, ultimately inadequate as critical theories

o the present. Within the ramework I am presenting, the notion o historical

indeterminacy can be reappropriated as that which becomes possible when the

constraints exerted by capital are overcome. Social democracy would then reer to

attempts to ameliorate inequality within the ramework o the necessity imposed

structurally by capital. Although indeterminate, a postcapitalist social orm o lie

could arise only as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal

tensions o capital, not as a tigers leap out o history.

A second general issue raised by recent historical transormations is that o

the Soviet Union and communism, o actually existing socialism. Retrospec-tively, it can be argued that the rise and all o the USSR was intrinsically related

to the rise and all o state-centric capitalism. The historical transormations o

recent decades suggest that the Soviet Union was very much part o a larger his-

torical confguration o the capitalist social ormation, however great the hostility

between the USSR and Western capitalist countries had been.

This issue is closely related to that o internationalism and antihegemonic

politics, the theme o this essay. The collapse o the Soviet Union and the end

o the Cold War opened the possibility o a reinvigorated internationalism that

is globally critical. Such an internationalism would be very dierent rom those

orms o internationalism characteristic o the long Cold War, which were

essentially dualistic and, in terms o their orm, nationalistic; they were critical

o one camp in ways that served as a legitimating ideology or the other, rather

than regarding both camps as parts o a larger whole that should have been the

object o critique. Within this ramework, the post-1945 world contained only

one imperialist power the hegemon within the other camp. This basic patternalso holds true or supporters o China ollowing the Sino-Soviet split, with the

dierence that the other camp was constituted by two imperialist powersthe

United States and the USSR. Nevertheless, the critique o imperialism remained

dualistic: a critique o one camp rom the standpoint o another camp.

Yet the frst decade o the twenty-frst century has not been marked by the

strong emergence o a post Cold War orm o internationalism. Instead it has


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seen a resurgence o older orms, o hollowed-out ater-orms o Cold War inter-

nationalism.

This essay presents some very preliminary reections on this resur-gent dualistic internationalism, as an expression o an impasse reached by many

antihegemonic movements, while reecting critically on dierent orms o politi-

cal violence.

The impasse to which I am reerring has been dramatized recently by many

responses on the Let, in the United States and in Europe, to the suicide bombing

o the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, as well as by the character o

the mass mobilizations against the Iraq War. The disastrous nature o the war

and, more generally, o the Bush administration should not obscure that in both

cases progressives ound themselves aced with what should have been viewed

as a dilemma a conict between an aggressive global imperial power and a

deeply reactionary counterglobalization movement in one case, and a brutal as-

cistic regime in the other. Yet in neither case were there many attempts to prob-

lematize this dilemma or to try to analyze this confguration with an eye toward

the possibility o ormulating what has become exceedingly difcult in the world

today a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developinga orm o internationalism that broke with the dualisms o a Cold War ramework

that all too requently legitimated (as anti-imperialist) states whose structures

and policies were no more emancipatory than those o many authoritarian and

repressive regimes supported by the American government.

Instead o breaking with such dualisms, however, many who opposed Ameri-

can policies have had recourse to precisely such inadequate and anachronistic

anti-imperialist conceptual rameworks and political stances. At the heart

o this neo-anti-imperialism is a etishistic understanding o global develop-

ment that is, a concretistic understanding o abstract historical processes in

political and agentive terms. The abstract and dynamic domination o capital has

become etishized on the global level as that o the United States, or, in some

variants, as that o the United States and Israel. It goes without saying that the dis-

astrous, imperial, and imperious character o the Bush administration has helped

mightily in this conation. Nevertheless, it is unortunately ironic that, in many

respects, this worldview recapitulates one o a century ago in which the subjectpositions o the United States and Israel were occupied by Britain and the Jews.

However counterintuitive this similarity between a critique o hegemony today

that understands itsel as a critique rom the Let and what had been a rightist

critique o hegemony it points to overlapping etishized understandings o the

world and suggests that such understandings have very negative consequences or

the constitution o adequate antihegemonic politics today.


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This reawakened Manichaeism which is at odds with other orms o anti-

globalization, such as the antisweatshop movement, that developed over the pre-vious decade has been accompanied by the reappearance o a deep conusion

regarding political violence that had, at times, plagued the New Let. The result

is a orm o opposition that highlights some difculties aced by antihegemonic

movements in ormulating an adequate critique in the post-Fordist era. This dual-

istic orm o antihegemonic opposition is not adequate to the contemporary world

and, in some cases, can even serve as a legitimating ideology or what a hundred

years ago would have been termed imperialist rivalries.

Let me elaborate by frst turning briey to the ways in which many liberals and

progressives responded to the attack o September 11. The most general argument

made was that the action, as horrible as it may have been, had to be understood

as a reaction to American policies, especially in the Middle East.1 While it is the

case that terrorist violence should be understood as political (and not simply as

an irrational act), the understanding o the politics o violence expressed by such

arguments is, nevertheless, utterly inadequate. Such violence is understood as a

reaction o the insulted, injured, and downtrodden, not as an action. While theviolence itsel is not necessarily afrmed, the politics o the specifc orm o vio-

lence committed are rarely interrogated. Instead, the violence is explained (and

at times implicitly justifed) as a response. Within this schema, there is only one

actor in the world: the United States.

This sort o argument ocuses on the grievances o those who carry out such

actions without engaging the ramework o meaning within which those griev-

ances are expressed. The actions that ow rom those meanings are taken simply

as expressions o anger, however unortunate.2 Such arguments neither interrogate

the understanding o the world that motivated this violence nor critically analyze

the sort o politics implied by violence directed intentionally against civilians.

Consequently, such arguments can become implicitly apologetic rather than politi-

1. The ollowing articles are exemplary o the sort o position I am outlining: Naomi Klein,

Game Over, Nation, October 1, 2001, www.thenation.com/doc/20011001/klein; Robert Fisk,

Terror in America, Nation, October 1, 2001, 7, www.thenation.com/doc/20011001/fsk; NoamChomsky, A Quick Reaction, Counterpunch, September 12, 2001, www.counterpunch.org/

chomskybomb.html; Howard Zinn, Violence Doesnt Work, Progressive, September 14, 2001, www

.progressive.org/webex/wxzinn091401.html.

2. The absence o any sustained critical analysis o movements such as al-Qaeda or Hamas, or

o regimes such as those o Baathist Iraq or Syria, suggests that this sort o chickens come home to

roost position involves the projection o political opposition to American policies by Western critics

onto the actors in the Middle East. The suering and misre o those actors are taken seriously, but

their politics and ideologies are bracketed.


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cal; they make little attempt to understand the strategic calculations involved not

so much o the bombers as o their handlers and ignore issues o ideology. It is aserious error, or example, to interpret the elt grievances underlying a movement

like al-Qaeda in narrow terms, as an immediate reaction to American policies

and Israeli policies. This ignores too many other dimensions o the new jihadism.

For example, when Osama bin Laden speaks o the blow inicted on the Muslims

eighty years ago, he is not reerring to the ounding o the state o Israel but to

the abolition o the caliphate (and, hence, o the purported unity o the Muslim

world) by Ataturk in 1924 long beore the United States was involved in the

Middle East and beore Israel was established. It is noteworthy that the vision he

expresses is more global than local, which is one o the salient eatures o the new

jihadism, in terms o both the struggles it supports (transorming them into mani-

estations o a single struggle) and its driving ideology. And an important aspect

o the global character o that ideology has been anti-Semitism.

Addressing anti-Semitism is crucially important when considering issues o

globalization and antiglobalization, even i it can be subject to misunderstand-

ings because o the degree to which the charge o anti-Semitism has been usedas an ideology o legitimation by Israeli regimes in order to discredit all serious

criticisms o Israeli policies. It is certainly possible to ormulate a undamental

critique o those policies that is not anti-Semitic, and, indeed, many such critiques

have been ormulated. On the other hand, criticism o Israel should not blind one

to the existence today o widespread and virulent anti-Semitism in the Arab/

Muslim world. As I will try to elaborate, anti-Semitism poses a very determinate

problem or the Let.

The atermath o September 11 revealed the degree to which anti-Semitic

motis have become widespread in the Arab world. (In this essay I will not

also address the issue o resurgent anti-Semitism and implicit Holocaust denial

in Europe.) Expressions o this ideology include the idea widespread in the

Middle East that only the Jews could have organized the attack on the World

Trade Center, and the widespread dissemination in the Arab world o the Proto-

cols o the Elders o Zion the inamous czarist abrication distributed widely

in the frst hal o the twentieth century by the Nazis and Henry Ford, purportingto expose the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The extensive and intensive

spread o such global conspiratorial thought was dramatically revealed recently

by the Egyptian television seriesHorseman without a Horse, which made use o

the Protocols o the Elders o Zion as a historical source, and the spread in the

Arab media o medieval Christian blood libel charges that Jews kill non-Jewish

children in order to use their blood or ritual purposes.


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This development should be taken seriously. It should neither be treated as

a somewhat exaggerated maniestation o an understandable reaction to Israeliand American policies, nor should it be bracketed as a result o the dualistically

grounded ear that ocusing on it can only urther Israeli occupation o the West

Bank and Gaza. Grasping its political signifcance, however, requires understand-

ing modern anti-Semitism. On the one hand, modern anti-Semitism is a orm o

essentializing discourse that, like all such orms, understands social and historical

phenomena in biologistic or culturalistic terms. On the other hand, anti-Semitism

can be distinguished rom other essentializing orms, such as most orms o rac-

ism, by its populist and apparently antihegemonic, antiglobal character. Whereas

most orms o race thinking commonly impute concrete bodily and sexual power

to the Other, modern anti-Semitism attributes enormous power to Jews, which is

abstract, universal, global, and intangible. At the heart o modern anti-Semitism

is a notion o the Jews as an immensely powerul, secret international conspiracy.

I have argued elsewhere that the modern anti-Semitic worldview understands the

abstract domination o capital which subjects people to the compulsion o mys-

terious orces they cannot perceive as the domination o International Jewry.Anti-Semitism, consequently, can appear to be antihegemonic. This is the

reason why a century ago August Bebel, the German Social Democratic leader,

characterized it as the socialism o ools. Given its subsequent development, it

could also have been called the anti-imperialism o ools. As a etishized orm

o oppositional consciousness, it is particularly dangerous because it appears to

be antihegemonic, the expression o a movement o the little people against an

intangible, global orm o domination.

It is as a etishized, prooundly reactionary orm o anti-capitalism that I

would like to begin discussing the recent surge o modern anti-Semitism in the

Arab World. It is a serious mistake to view this surge o anti-Semitism only as

a response to the United States and Israel. This empiricistic reduction would

be akin to explaining Nazi anti-Semitism simply as a reaction to the Treaty o

Versailles. While American and Israeli policies have doubtlessly contributed to

the rise o this new wave o anti-Semitism, the United States and Israel occupy

subject positions in the ideology that go ar beyond their actual empirical roles.Those positions, I would argue, must also be understood with reerence to the

massive historical transormations since the early 1970s, to the transition rom

Fordism to post-Fordism.

An important aspect o this transition has been the increasing importance o

supranational (as opposed to international) economic networks and ows, which

has been accompanied by a decline in eective national sovereignty by the


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growing inability o national state structures (including those o national metropo-

les) to successully control economic processes. This has been maniested by thedecline o the Keynesian welare state in the West and the collapse o bureaucratic

party states in the East. It has been associated with increasing vertical dierentia-

tion between the rich and the poor within all countries, and among countries and

regions.

The collapse o Fordism has meant the end o the phase o state-directed,

nationally based development whether on the basis o the communist model,

the social-democratic model, or the statist-developmentalist Third World model.

This has posed enormous difculties or many countries and huge conceptual

difculties or all those who viewed the state as an agent o positive change and

development.

The eects o the collapse o the midcentury Fordist synthesis have been di-

erential; they have varied in dierent parts o the world. The relative East Asian

success in riding the new wave o post-Fordist globalization is well known, as

is the disastrous decline o sub-Saharan Arica. Less well known is the steep

decline o the Arab world, which was dramatically revealed in the United NationsArab Human Development Reporto 2002, according to which per capita income

in the Arab world has shrunk in the past twenty years to a level just above that o

sub-Saharan Arica. Even in Saudi Arabia, or example, the per capita GDP ell

rom $24,000 in the late 1970s to $7,000 at the beginning o this century.

The reasons or this decline are complex. I would suggest that an important

raming condition or the relative decline o the Arab/Muslim world has been

the undamental historical restructuring alluded to above. For whatever reasons,

the authoritarian state structures associated with the Arab nationalism o the

postwar Fordist epoch proved incapable o adjusting to these global transorma-

tions. These transormations, it could be argued, weakened and undermined Arab

nationalism even more than did the military loss to Israel in 1967. Such abstract

historical processes can appear mysterious on the ground, beyond the ability o

local actors to inuence, and can generate eelings o powerlessness.

At the same time, or a variety o reasons, progressive social and political

movements directed against the status quo in the Middle East have been inor-dinately weak, or, as in Iraq or the Sudan, violently suppressed. (It has been the

additional misortune o such progressive movements that the secular authori-

tarian regimes suppressing them were either regarded as progressive within the

dominant Cold War ramework or, at the very least, were not the objects o sus-

tained progressive critical analysis.) A vacuum was created by the ailure o Arab


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nationalist as well as putatively traditional monarchist regimes, both o which

suppressed progressive oppositions. This vacuum has been flled by Islamicistmovements, which purport to explain the apparently mysterious decline people in

the Arab/Muslim world have been experiencing, one that has generated a palpable

sense o disillusionment and political despair.

A contributing actor to this ideological, reactionary mode o understand-

ing the crisis o an entire region is the degree to which the Palestinian struggle

or sel-determination has been unctionalized or decades by Arab regimes as

a nationalist lightening rod to deect popular anger and discontent. (Again, to

avoid unnecessary misunderstandings to say that Palestinian struggles have

been unctionalized does not discredit those struggles themselves.) The tendency

to attribute the misre o the Arab masses and, increasingly, the educated middle

classes, to evil external orces, however, has become much more intense with the

recent decline o the Arab world. The ideological ramework that was already

available to make sense o this decline was ormulated by thinkers such as the

ideologue o the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyed Qutb, who rejected capi-

talist modernity and regarded it as a plot created by Jews (Freud, Marx, Durkheim)to undermine healthy societies. Within his anti-Semitic imaginary, Israel was

simply the bridgehead or a powerul and pernicious global conspiracy. This sort

o ideology had been supported and promoted by Nazi propaganda eorts in the

Middle East in the 1930s and the 1940s. It was strongly reinorced by Soviet Cold

War ideology ater the 1967 war, which introduced anti-Semitic motis into its

critique o Israel and which contributed to the spread o a orm o anti-Zionism,

strongly inormed by anti-Semitic themes o singular abhorrence and conspirato-

rial global power, that became widespread in the Middle East and within seg-

ments o the Let especially in Europe in the past three decades.

The greatly increased extent and importance o the anti-Semitic worldview in

the Middle East in recent decades, however, should also, in my view, be seen as

the spread o a purportedly antihegemonic ideology in the ace o the negative

and disruptive eects o apparently mysterious historical orces. I am suggesting,

in other words, that the spread o anti-Semitism and, relatedly, anti-Semitic orms

o Islamicism (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian o-shoot, Hamas) should be understood as the spread o a etishized anticapitalist

ideology which claims to make sense o a world perceived as threatening. This

ideology may be sparked and exacerbated by Israel and Israeli policies, but its

resonance is rooted in the relative decline o the Arab world against the back-

ground o the massive structural transormations associated with the transition


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rom Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism. The result is a populist antihege-

monic movement that is prooundly reactionary and dangerous, not least o all orany hope or progressive politics in the Arab/Muslim world.

Rather than analyzing this reactionary orm o resistance in ways that would

help support more progressive orms o resistance, however, many on the Western

Let have either ignored it or rationalized it as an unortunate, i understandable,

reaction to Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank. This basically uncriti-

cal political stance, I would argue, is related to a etishized identifcation o the

United States with global capital. There are many implications o this conation.

One is that other powers, such as the European Union, are not treated critically as

rising cohegemons/competitors in a global capitalist dynamic order, whose rising

positions help shape the contours o global power today. Rather, the role o the

EU, or example, is bracketed or Europe is implicitly treated as a haven o peace,

understanding, and social justice. This orm o misrecognition is related to the

tendency to grasp the abstract (the domination o capital) as concrete (American

hegemony). This tendency, I would argue, is an expression o a deep and unda-

mental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.Let me try to elaborate by reecting on the mass antiwar mobilizations in so

many parts o the world against the American war in Iraq. At frst glance, recent

mobilizations appear to be a reprise o the great antiwar movement o the 1960s.

Yet, I would argue, there are undamental dierences between them. Considering

those dierences may shed light on the current impasse o the Let.

The antiwar movements in the 1960s were spearheaded by many people or

whom opposition to the war waged by the United States in Vietnam was intrin-

sically related to a larger struggle or progressive political and social change.

This, arguably, was also the case o movements opposed to the American policies

toward the regime in Cuba, the socialist government in Chile, the Sandinistas in

Nicaragua, and the ANC in South Arica. In all these cases, the United States was

regarded as a conservative orce opposed to such change. American opposition

to movements o national liberation was criticized particularly strongly precisely

because such movements were regarded positively. It is the case that there were

important dierences among those who regarded movements o national liber-ation as orces or progressive change. One important dierence was between

those who regarded such movements positively because they were seen to be at

the oreront o the expansion o the socialist camp, hence part o the Cold War,

and those or whom such movements were important because they were regarded

as autochthonous liberation movements that undermined the bipolarity o the

Cold War and whose positive relation to the USSR was contingent a unction


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language o democracy and liberation. It is the case, o course, that, although the

Bush regime speaks o democratic change in the Middle East, it will not reallyhelp eect such change. Nevertheless, that only the Bush administration raised

this issue reveals starkly that the Let did not do so.

I a generation ago, opposition to American policy consciously entailed sup-

porting struggles or liberation deemed progressive, today the opposition to

American policy in and o itsel is deemed antihegemonic. This, paradoxically, is,

in part, an unortunate legacy o the Cold War and the dualistic worldview associ-

ated with it. The spatial category o camp, which expressed a global version o

the Great Game, was substituted or temporal categories o historical possibilities

and o emancipation as the determinate historical negation o capitalism. This not

only helped blur the idea o socialism as the historical beyond o capitalism but

also helped skew understandings o international developments.

Inasmuch as the progressive camp was defned by a spatial, essentially dual-

istic ramework, the content o the termprogressive could, on the international

level, become increasingly contingent, a unction o a global balance o power.

What the Cold War seems to have eradicated rom memory, or example, is thatopposition to an imperial power is not necessarily progressive, that there were as-

cist anti-imperialisms as well. This distinction was blurred during the Cold War

in part because the USSR aligned itsel with authoritarian regimes, or example,

in the Middle East, that had little in common with socialist and communist move-

ments, that, i anything, had more in common with ascism than communism and

that, in act, sought to liquidate their own Let. Consequently, anti-Americanism

per se became coded as progressive, although there had and have been deeply

reactionary as well as progressive orms o anti-Americanism.

Why did many on the Let including those who did not regard the Soviet

Union afrmatively adopt this dualistic Cold War ramework, retaining its

shell even ater the Cold War? How did so many progressives back themselves

into a corner where it appeared that the only political issue globally was U.S.

policy, regardless o the nature o other regimes?

I would like to begin addressing this problem indirectly, with reerence to the

issue o political violence. As I mentioned, those who were critical o the enor-mous tide o anger and nationalism that swept the United States ater September

11 requently noted that there was a great deal o rage directed against the United

States, especially in Arab and Muslim countries. This general position, however,

usually sidestepped analyzing the sorto politics the attack on September 11

expressed. It is signifcant that such an attack was not undertaken two or three

decades ago by groups that had every reason to be angry at the United States or


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example the Vietnamese Communists or the Chilean Let. It is important to note

that the absence o such an attack then was not contingent, but an expression opolitical principle. Indeed, an attack directed primarily against civilians was out-

side o the horizon o the political imaginaries o such groups.

The category o anger is not sufcient to understand the violence o Septem-

ber 11. Forms o violence have to be understood politically, not apologetically. Let

me give an example: in the mid-1980s, there was internal political pressure on the

central committee o the Arican National Congress to begin a campaign o ter-

ror against white South Arican civilians. Such demands expressed the desire or

revenge as well as the idea that white South Aricans would agree to dismantleapartheid only i they suered just as black South Aricans had suered. The

ANC central committee reused to countenance such demands, not only or tac-

tical, strategic, and pragmatic reasons (the eects o such orms o violence on

postapartheid civil society and on the regime), but also or reasons o political

principle. It was argued that movements or emancipation do not choose the civil-

ian population as their main target.

I would like to suggest that there is a undamental dierence between move-ments that do not target civilians randomly (such as the Viet Minh and Viet Cong

and the ANC) and those that do (such as the IRA, al-Qaeda, and Hamas). This

dierence is not simply tactical but prooundly political; a relation exists between

the orm o violence and the orm o politics. That is, I want to suggest that the

sort o uture society and polity implicitly expressed by the political praxis o

militant social movements that distinguish military rom civilian targets diers

rom that implied by the praxis o movements that make no such distinction. The

latter tend to be concerned with identity. In the broadest sense they are radically

nationalist, operating on the basis o a riend/oe distinction that essentializes a

civilian population as the enemy and closes o the possibility o uture coexis-

tence. For that reason, the programs o such movements present little in the way

o socioeconomic analysis aimed at transorming social structures (which should

not be conated with social services, which movements may or may not provide).

In such cases, the twentieth-century dialectic o war and revolution is transormed

into the subsumption o revolution under war. My concern here, however, hasless to do with such movements than it does with contemporary metropolitan

opposition movements and why they apparently have had difculty distinguishing

between these very dierent orms o resistance.

The attack o September 11, 2001, calls into question some notions o violence

and resistance that spread among parts o the New Let in the late 1960s and early

1970s, as undamentally as the Soviet invasion o Prague in August 1968 and


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lence ound in the works o Georges Sorel, Vilredo Pareto, and Frantz Fanon.

Those thinkers, according to Arendt, glorifed violence or the sake o violence.Motivated by a much deeper hatred o bourgeois society than the conventional

Let or whom violence could be a means in the struggle or a just society, Sorel,

Pareto, and Fanon regarded violence per se as inherently emancipatory, as a radi-

cal break with societys moral standards. Retrospectively, we can see that the sort

o existentialist violence promulgated may have eected a break with bourgeois

society but not, however, with capitalism. Indeed, it seems to acquire most

importance during transitions rom one historical confguration o capitalism to

another.Thinking with Arendt, I will briey consider the resurgence in the late 1960s

o Sorelian-type glorifcations o violence. The late 1960s were a crucial histori-

cal moment, one when the necessity o the present, o the current social order,

was undamentally called into question. Viewed retrospectively, it was a moment

when state-centered Fordist capitalism and its statist actually existing socialist

equivalent ran up against historical limits. Attempts to get beyond those limits

were, however, singularly unsuccessul, even on a conceptual level. As the Ford-ist synthesis began to unravel, utopian hopes were nourished. At the same time,

the target o social, political, and cultural discontent became maddeningly elu-

sive and all-pervasive. The elt pressures or change were present, but the road to

change was very unclear.

In this period, students and youth were not so much reacting against exploita-

tion as they were reacting against bureaucratization and alienation. Not only did

classical workers movements seem unable to address the burning issues or many

young radicals, but those movements as well as the actually existing social-

ist regimes seemed to be deeply implicated in precisely what the students and

youth were rebelling against.

Faced with this new historical situation, this political terra incognita, many

oppositional movements took a turn to the conceptually amiliar, to a ocus on

concrete expressions o domination, such as military violence or bureaucratic

police-state political domination. Such a ocus allowed or a conception o oppo-

sitional politics that was itsel concrete and, requently, particularistic (e.g.,nationalism). Examples were concretistic orms o anti-imperialism as well as the

growing ocus by some on concrete domination in the communist East. As dier-

ent, and even opposed, as these political responses may have appeared at the time,

both occluded the nature o the abstract domination o capital just when capitals

regime was becoming less state-centric and, in that sense, even more abstract.

The turn to Sorelian violence was a moment o this turn to the concrete. Vio-


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lence, or the idea o violence, was seen as an expression o political will, o his-

torical agency, countering structures o bureaucratization and alienation. In theace o alienation and bureaucratic stasis, violence was deemed creative, and vio-

lent action per se became viewed as revolutionary. In spite o the association o

violence with political will, however, I would argue, as did Arendt, that the new

glorifcation o violence o the late 1960s was caused by a severe rustration o

the aculty o action in the modern world. That is, it expressed an underlying

despair with regard to the real efcacy o political will, o political agency. In a

historical situation o heightened helplessness, violence both expressed the rage

o helplessness and helped suppress such eelings o helplessness. It became anact o sel-constitution as outsider, as other, rather than an instrument o trans-

ormation. Yet, ocused as it was on the bureaucratic stasis o the Fordist world,

it echoed the destruction o that world by the dynamics o capital. The idea o a

undamental transormation became bracketed and, instead, was replaced by the

more ambiguous notion o resistance.

The notion o resistance, however, says little about the nature o that which is

being resisted or o the politics o the resistance involved that is, the charac-ter o determinate orms o critique, opposition, rebellion, and revolution. The

notion o resistance requently expresses a deeply dualistic worldview that tends

to reiy both the system o domination and the idea o agency. It is rarely based

on a reexive analysis o possibilities or undamental change that are both gen-

erated and suppressed by a dynamic heteronomous order. In that sense it lacks

reexivity. It is an undialectical category that does not grasp its own conditions o

possibility; that is, it ails to grasp the dynamic historical context o which it is a

part. Relatedly, it blurs important distinctions between politically very dierent

orms o violence.

What I have characterized as a turn to the concrete in the ace o abstract

domination is, o course, a orm o reifcation. It can take various shapes. Two that

have emerged with considerable orce in the past 150 years have been the cona-

tion o British and, then, American hegemony with that o global capital, as well

as the personifcation o the latter as the Jews. This turn to the concrete, together

with a worldview strongly inuenced by Cold War dualisms (even among let-ists critical o the Soviet Union), helped constitute a ramework o understanding

within which recent mass antiwar mobilizations operated, where opposition to a

global power did not even implicitly point to a desired emancipatory transorma-

tion, certainly not in the Middle East. Such a reifed understanding ends up tacitly

supporting movements and regimes that have much more in common with earlier


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reactionary even ascist orms o rebellion than they do with anything we

can call progressive.I have described an impasse o the Let today and sought to relate it to a orm

o reifed thought and sensibility that expressed the disintegration o the Fordist

synthesis beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In my view this impasse

expresses a complex crisis o the Let related to a perception that the industrial

working class was not and would not become a revolutionary subject. At the same

time, this crisis was related to the end o the state-centric order. The power o the

state as an agent o social and democratic change was undermined, and the global

order was transormed rom an international to a supranational one. I would liketo briey outline an additional aspect o the reifcation associated with the impasse

o the Let in the ace o the collapse o Fordism. Neoliberal global capitalism

has, o course, been promoted by successive American regimes. To completely

conate the global neoliberal order and the United States would, nevertheless,

be a colossal mistake, politically as well as theoretically. In the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, the hegemonic role o Great Britain and the liberal

world order was challenged by the growing power o a number o nation-states,most notably Germany. These rivalries, which culminated in two world wars,

were reerred to as imperialist rivalries. Today we may be seeing the beginnings

o a return to an era o imperialist rivalry on a new and expanded level. One o the

emerging ongoing areas o tension is between the Atlantic powers and a Europe

organized around a French-German condominium.

The war in Iraq can, in part, be seen as an opening salvo in this rivalry.

Whereas a century ago, the Germans sought to challenge the British Empire by

means o the Berlin Baghdad Railroad, more recently the Iraqi Baath regime was

on its way to becoming a Franco-German client state. It is very signifcant that in

2000, Saddam Husseins Iraq became the frst country to replace the dollar with

the euro as the currency mediating the sale o oil. This substitution, o course,

challenged the dollars position as a world currency. At issue is not whether the

Euro Bloc represents a progressive or regressive alternative to the United States.

Rather, it is that this action (and the American reaction) may plausibly be seen as

expressing the beginnings o an intercapitalist rivalry on a global scale. Europeis changing its meaning. It is now being constructed as a possible counterhegemon

to the United States.

The American attempt to reassert control over the Gul and its oil should be

understood as preemptive, but in a dierent sense than the way the term was used

by the ideologues o the Bush administration and their critics. The American


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action is, I would argue, a preemptive strike against the possible emergence o

Europe or China (or any other power) as a rival military as well as economicsuperpower, that is, as an imperial rival. The reemergence o imperialist rivalries

calls or the recovery o nondualistic orms o internationalism.

However objectionable the current American administration is and it is

deeply objectionable on a very wide range o issues the Let should be very

careul about becoming, unwittingly, the stalking horse or a would-be rival hege-

mon. On the eve o World War I, the German General Sta thought it important

or Germany that the war be ought against Russia as well as France and Great

Britain. Because Russia was the most reactionary and autocratic European Power,the war could then be presented as a war or central European culture against

the dark barbarism o Russia, which would guarantee Social Democratic support

or the war. This political strategy succeeded and resulted in a catastrophe or

Europe in general and or Germany in particular. We are very ar rom a prewar

situation like that o 1914. Nevertheless, the Let should not make a similar mis-

take by supporting, however implicitly, rising counterhegemons in order to deend

civilization against the threat posed by a reactionary power.However difcult the task o grasping and conronting global capital might

be, it is crucially important that a global internationalism be recovered and reor-

mulated. Retaining the reifed dualistic political imaginary o the Cold War runs

the risk o constituting a orm o politics that, rom the standpoint o human

emancipation, would be questionable, at the very best, however many people it

may rouse.

moishe postone - history and helplessness

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