“The rules of the game”? by A Sivanandan
01 September 2005
We live in such a vortex of change that no sooner have we seized the time than it has passed us by. But that is the very reason why we must be more vigilant than ever about constraining power and invigilating the insidious ways of government as it changes “the rules of the game”. To do that, however, we need the courage to abandon old ideologies which bear us down, the honesty to turn our faces against intellectual fads and fetishes which turn us away from engagement and the commitment to fight injustice wherever we find it. We need, too, the type of political analysis that Owen and Godwin, Saint-Simon and Fourier, Marx and Engels did for their time in the maelstrom of the industrial revolution - an analysis immanent in which were the strategies that would inform the working-class struggles against capital - and out of that conflict elicit, if not socialism, at least the democratic rights and freedoms that have come down to us.
And it is those rights and freedoms that we are in danger of losing today. The working-class forces that won them for us have been disaggregated and dispersed by the technological revolution - even as that revolution concentrates wealth in the hands of giant corporations and sets them free to roam the world, with the nation-states of the West clearing capital’s imperial way by setting up stooge governments for consenting Third World countries, and regime change for those who refuse to play imperial ball. National governments, which under industrial capitalism worked in the interests of their people, under electronic capitalism work in the interests of multinational corporations - and the welfare state cedes to the market state, where those who own the media ‘own’ the votes that elect the government, where the social fall-out is mediated through welfare sops and controlled through draconian legislation which corrodes the whole fabric of civil society.
Some of these processes were already there in the very nature of globalisation. The fall of Communism hastened them and made them universal. 11 September entrenched them, and the ensuing war on terror added a military dimension to the economic project, justified through a politics of prejudice and fear to create a culture of xeno-racism and Islamaphobia: the asylum seeker at the gate and the shadow Muslim within.
It is that symbiosis between racism and imperialism, and imperialism and globalisation that now frames our times. We cannot combat the one without combating the others. Imperialism is the project, globalisation the process, culture the vehicle, and the nationstate the political and military agent. To look at racism as an isolate without considering its relationship to globalisation, and therefore imperialism, is not only to descend into culturalism and ethnicism but to overlook the state racism that embeds institutional racism and gives a fillip to popular racism in the form of laws and edicts that starve and dehumanise asylum seekers whom globalisation has displaced and thrown up on the shores of Europe.
To look at globalisation without relating it to imperialism and therefore racism is not only to regard its penetration into Third World countries as an inevitable extension of trade and not as a precursor to the regime change that follows in its wake, but to overlook the racist discourse that accompanies it and in turn feeds into popular racism.
To look at imperialism without relating it to globalisation and racism is not just to accept the notion that regime change and preemptive strikes have no underlying economic motive but are a defensive strategy against ‘the axis of evil’ and the terrorists they breed - (‘post-modern imperialism’, Robert Cooper, one-time adviser to our PM and the EU, calls it). It is also to accept the hoary old myth of the white man’s burden of bringing civilisation and enlightenment to the lesser breeds, of freeing them from tyranny, forcing them to be free, bombing them into freedom and democracy.