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Month: March 2022

Some refugees more welcome than others

Open the borders to all refugees – from Ukraine of course, but also from the Middle East and Africa


03/03/2022

The mobilization against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been inspiring. Tens of thousands organized in solidarity with a people under attack, collecting donations or organizing the transport of refugees. On Sunday, millions took to the streets to demand an end to war and to Russian imperialism. In Berlin, 100,000 people gathered in the city center to not only protest against the war, but to also demand immediate support for those who have to flee their homes.

A few months ago, in November, I was at a protest with a similar purpose. Also gathering at Pariser Platz and going down Unter den Linden, it was attended by a much lower, though by no means insignificant, number of people. This time it was to demand the immediate opening of EU borders for the intake of the thousands of Middle Eastern refugees whom Belarus had weaponized by forcing them to attempt illegal border crossings. At least 21 migrants died in the cold forests at the Polish border. While Poland is now welcoming all those who are allowed to leave Ukraine (with reports, however, of Africans pushed to the back of the queue at “Ukrainian-first” entry points into Poland), thousands of refugees are still stranded at the Belarussian border, not allowed to enter. Polish plans to build a border wall against migrants in the Białowieża Forest are also still in place and still protested by Polish activists.

Indeed, it is difficult to even find information about them in a media landscape understandingly dominated by the invasion of Ukraine. This is one example of a tension in the left’s response to the crisis in Eastern Europe. Calls for solidarity share space with remarks that conflicts, invasions, and imperialist aggressions outside of Europe have rarely received the same amount of attention and mobilization. These should not be competing narratives. Except for a few campists who support Russian aggression as a response to American imperialism, none would argue against unconditional support for the rights of Ukrainians to defend themselves and to find refuge in other countries. As journalist Vincent Bevins wrote in a viral tweet, “Why does the world care so much about Ukraine?” is a harmful, anti-solidaristic question to ask about the current situation. A better one would be “Why doesn’t the world care more about suffering in places like Yemen and Afghanistan?”

Humanitarian aid… is offered more willingly to those who are perceived to be productive capitalist workers (“middle-class”), to those who might be better assimilated without disturbing existing hierarchies (“like us”), and to those who are not racialized as others (“with blue eyes and blond hair”)

Unfortunately, the reason for this was often made explicit in media coverage of the invasion. Reporters have expressed their astonishment at the fact that war was happening in a “relatively civilized” country on the European continent. Although the US and European states have been direct causes of wars in “uncivilized” countries, Western reporters find it difficult to comprehend that militaristic aggression starts from the core of the so-called developed world. In this worldview, campaigns conducted by Western powers in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria are justifiable because they are against “uncivilized” peoples living in uncivilized places. The ideologies covering imperialism and capitalist accumulation have in the past week taken the role of preserving a self-image of a peaceful Europe.

In the case of refugees, this historical and political exceptionalism becomes inscribed on their bodies. It is not only the places that are civilized, but also the people seeking help. They deserve support, it is said, because they are “middle-class” or “like us.” In some cases, the racism is not only implied, but said out loud, with a former deputy prosecutor in Ukraine saying on BBC that the plight of Ukrainian refugees is shocking because they have “blue eyes and blond hair.” The comparison with Middle Eastern refugees is also not just implicit. The Al Jazeera English commentator sympathetic to “middle-class” Ukrainians went on to stress that “these are not, obviously, refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East.” Visegrad 24, a Central European news outlet, regularly tweets statements such as “Not all refugees are equal” or, captioning a picture of a Ukrainian woman with children, “This is how real refugees look like.”

It is essential to understand that this does not mean that all coverage of the Ukraine invasion is pure CIA propaganda badly covering up the fascist reality and that Russia is somehow the anti-imperialist hero of the story. Rather, we are now witnessing, in real time and close proximity, the uneven distribution of who is considered worthy of solidarity. Judith Butler wrote about the Iraq war and about the Guantánamo Bay illegal detention center, arguing that the mechanisms of imperial aggression and the ideologies that sustain them make some lives more grievable than others.

Humanitarian aid is predicated on a liberal universalism. An exclusionary universalism that judges all lives according to the Euroamerican standard. The capacity of European states to aid others, to welcome them into the prosperity created by imperial wars and accumulation, is not unconditional. It is offered more willingly to those who are perceived to be productive capitalist workers (“middle-class”), to those who might be better assimilated without disturbing existing hierarchies (“like us”), and to those who are not racialized as others (“with blue eyes and blond hair”). The wealth of the West is only justifiable if people elsewhere, who are different, are disposable.

That is why the Visegrad 24 Twitter account can tout the humanitarian hospitality of Poland, while arguing that the country has the right to defend its borders against the refugees pushed through Belarus. Some lives are considered to deserve being saved less than others, and some people are considered to deserve being here less than others. Saying this without weakening our claims to solidarity with the Ukrainian people may be a difficult rhetorical task. But we should not give up on saying it. As we should not ignore the outrageous increase in German military funding (which also caused the stocks of German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall to go up 40% on Monday), even though we encourage support for Ukrainian defense efforts. As we should not ignore the violently Islamophobic video of Azov Battalion soldiers shared by the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian National Guard, even though we find Putin’s claims to “denazify” Ukraine to be themselves merely fascist pretenses.

There is no contradiction in acknowledging, at the same time, that there is rampant racism in Eastern Europe manifesting in the differential admission of refugees. That the Ukrainian people are the victims of imperialist aggression and deserve our unreserved support and help. We should care about Ukraine, and we should care about the Ukrainian people. If now is not the right time to question hypocrisy, when is? We should also take this chance to question why we have cared less about the suffering of others. 

Elections and Class Struggle in France: How useful is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? (Part One)

With the French Socialist Party in ruins, the France Insoumise is proposing a new version of left reformism. How useful is it to French working people?


02/03/2022

The French presidential elections take place in April 2022. With two far-right candidates, and with Macron playing a strong hand, there is plenty of bad news, but there is a hopeful side too. This article (part one) will look at the usefulness for working people of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s campaign and organization. Part two will look at his left patriotism, foreign policy, and at some major disagreements of Marxists with his strategy.

Mélenchon got seven million votes (19.5%) in the first round of the French presidential elections in 2017, the biggest radical left vote in France since 1945. France Insoumise (FI) votes were particularly common among blue-collar voters (24%), low-paid white-collar voters (22%) and among 18-24 year-olds (30%). At present, at over 11% in the polls, Mélenchon has at least three times the support of the Socialist Party, which held the presidency till 2017, and no other left candidate comes near. In the last elections, 21.4% was enough to get through to the second round. Fewer may be sufficient this time, and Mélenchon’s team is hoping to mobilize those working-class voters who usually stay home, to create a surprise on election day.

Mélenchon’s pitch and his programme [1]

The fact that, after five years of Macron, the 500 richest families in France have doubled their wealth, while the number of children living in poverty has risen by 40%, along with the remarkable combativity and class consciousness of French workers in recent years, guarantees that there is plenty of space for the radical left. Mélenchon and his team believe it is possible to bring about a “citizens’ revolution” to usher in “the epoch of the people”, to quote the titles of two of his many writings [L’ère du peuple, Paris, Fayard, 2014].

It is hardly surprising that so many are inspired and encouraged. The FI programme proposes dozens of measures to radically reverse the trend of wealth being siphoned off ever more by the 1%. It proposes to freeze prices on a series of basic necessities and to develop a policy of a basic quantity of free electricity and water for every household. A sharp rise in the minimum wage and of minimum pension rates is promised, while the laws passed by Macron and Hollande which restricted workers’ rights to organize and to have stable contracts, are to be repealed. The programme plans a completely free health service (at present most people take out complementary insurance). It also promises retirement at 60 and a shorter working week.

The vision put forward is one that takes full account of the urgency of climate deterioration: policies include the end of nuclear power before 2030, a move to 100% renewable energy, and the creation of a million and a half climate jobs. The intention is to set up massive support for organic agriculture, creating 300,000 jobs and moving quickly to 100% organic farming.

The programme reacts to recent movements by reserving a billion euros for the fight against sexist violence. And, after the recent scandal of large-scale mistreatment of elderly people in the Orpea chain of private retirement homes (1,100 homes across France), an FI government would only allow retirement homes to be run by non-profit organizations or by local governments.

A determined effort is planned to tax the rich more and stop the use of tax havens. On inheritance tax, Mélenchon’s programme would impose a twelve million euro maximum. Anything more than that would go into the public coffers (and, calculations show, could pay for student grants for all). For the rest of us, up to 120,000 euros of inheritance would be completely tax-free.

Finally, the France Insoumise [2] wants to change the constitution and sharply reduce the power of the president, moving to a sixth Republic (the Fifth was established in 1958). If Mélenchon were to be elected, he would call a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

In a world where austerity, privatization and individualism are sold to us as inevitable, it is a breath of fresh air to watch Mélenchon and FI members of parliament on television defending these reforms. And the reforms are popular. Early February, the manifesto was number six in the list of best-selling books in France, and the YouTube channel had 700,000 subscribers. A recent opinion poll [Harris, August 2021] showed that 88% of people approved of a sharp rise in the minimum wage, and 90% agreed retirement pensions should never be below the minimum wage. Eighty per cent said enough water for basic needs should be free and 86% are in favour of aiming towards 100% renewable energy, while 63% want a change in the constitution and the establishment of a sixth republic.

In addition to its radicality, the FI campaign has an insurgent tone, which drew millions of voters in 2017 who had previously stayed home at election time. Mélenchon quotes the great French writer Victor Hugo, saying “From now on, this word ‘Revolution’ will be the name of civilization, until it is replaced by the word ‘harmony’”. He likes to repeat in meetings that great left slogan “Ecology without class struggle is just gardening really”. And he insists that “the only thing that can limit exploitation is resistance to exploitation”.

Islamophobia

Like the rest of the radical and revolutionary left in France, the France Insoumise does not sufficiently mobilize a fight against islamophobia. Macron’s dissolution of groups that assisted victims of islamophobia was greeted only by angry press releases by the whole of the left. However, Mélenchon’s recent positions, with encouragement from anti-racist groups based in multi-ethnic, working class neighbourhoods, represent a historic shift in France on the question, as the islamophobic consensus on the left is now thoroughly broken. Fascist candidate Eric Zemmour accuses Mélenchon of “lying down passively before the Imam”, and he is regularly attacked for being “soft on Islamic fundamentalism”.

In December 2019 there was the first ever mass demonstration specifically against islamophobia in Paris. Mélenchon was there (whereas the Socialist Party refused to support). Unlike some, Mélenchon refuses to apologize for having been at the demo. This demonstration caused some dissensions within the Communist Party, and within the France Insoumise, with one of their MPs, François Ruffin, famously commenting that he wasn’t going to this demonstration “because I have football on Sundays”.

Since then, Mélenchon’s defence of Muslims against racism has only become louder, clearer, and more systematic. The FI group was the only parliamentary group to vote against the islamophobic laws – supposedly against “Muslim separatism”– pushed through by Macron last year. Mélenchon declared that “separatism” was “ a stupid concept” invented “in order to stigmatize Muslims”. He now regularly reminds his mass audiences that “hatred for Muslims is a central factor of division allowing the powerful to remain powerful”.[3]

It is not an accident that some influential Black anti-racist groups are calling to vote for him, when they are often uninterested in “white politics”. One explained it was because Mélenchon “had broken with the Islamophobic consensus” and because he defends “the creolization of society” (a term Mélenchon has often used) and explicitly rejects a White identity for France.

Usefulness in struggle

The fight against the power of capital has always had three main aspects: [4] Firstly, the concrete fight – gaining wage increases, union rights or permanent contracts; secondly, the political fight – pushing through laws that help our class (whether it be bigger health budgets or gay marriage) and finally the ideological fight, to push back the idea that “There is No Alternative” to vicious austerity and militarism, and to push forward the idea that capitalism can be overthrown, and explain how this might be done. How useful in these struggles is the FI?

If Mélenchon gets a strong vote in the first round, every concrete struggle will be encouraged. If he should get to the second round (and the large number of candidates means this is not impossible) it will be a political earthquake. Already in 2022, solid railway strikes and education strikes for pay have shown that a fightback is coming – a large radical left vote will help this along.

The France Insoumise has at present 17 MPs elected to the National Assembly, including a call-centre operator, Adrien Quatennens; a librarian, Danièle Obono; and a nursing assistant, Caroline Fiat. They have carried out intensive parliamentary work since 2017, occasionally managing to push through an amendment in the interests of the 99%, but more often proposing bills or amendments that are voted down, but that nevertheless allow a debate in parliament and in the media on a wide range of social questions. On the question of police racism, for example, the FI proposed an amendment that would oblige all police officers who checked someone’s ID to give a certificate to the person concerned. This would improve the situation in particular of Black and Arab men, by making repeated checks several times a day impossible. The FI MPs have stood out in their denunciation of police violence.

The vocal FI support in parliament and in the media for the successful campaign in 2019-2021 to push back Macron’s plan to smash pensions was certainly useful, as was the support for the Yellow Vests. The MPs organized a minute of silence during a parliamentary debate for the Yellow Vests killed and injured during the movement “because of their commitment to be citizens”.

FI MPs know how to attract the media. A couple of years back, when one of Macron’s ministers mocked those protesting at a cut of “only five euros” in Housing Benefit, France Insoumise MPs upset the government by coming into parliament with some shopping, to teach the minister what you can buy with five euros when you are poor. Last week, François Ruffin brandished a huge cheque for many billions of euros in parliament, symbolizing the money given by Macron to big business during his presidency.

On the key question of antifascism, Mélenchon is the one who had the courage to stand directly against Marine Le Pen in her own constituency in 2012, and the FI were central to the organization of last year’s rare mass demonstration against fascism. Meanwhile, one FI MP, François Ruffin, is responsible for the two best mass-distributed political documentaries in the last 30 years: “Je veux du soleil” (2019) [5] about the Yellow Vest revolt, and “Debout les femmes” (2021) on the work and struggles of women cleaners and care assistants.

The France Insoumise sees the presidential campaign as a time of crucial political education and debate (two and a half hour political interviews on prime-time TV is the way we do things here!). [6] Three of Mélenchon’s recent long TV interviews received more than 1.5 million visits on the FI YouTube channel. He is an extraordinarily good speaker. His February meeting at Montpellier, entitled “The rich are idlers” got an audience of 8 000 people, and 300 000 YouTube visits. For the political struggle of our class, the France Insoumise is doing its bit.

Libel and slander

Naturally, Mélenchon is the target of impressive smear campaigns, which have loudly trumpeted that he is a megalomaniac, a racist, an Islamist, an antisemite and, most recently, a friend of Putin’s. These smears usually come from the Right, the Socialist Party, the Greens or the mass media, but are occasionally taken up by people on the far left. [7] The smear campaigns run in the usual manner, with Socialist Party press releases saying “He’s a friend of Putin’s”, soft left papers saying “It is widely believed he is a friend of Putin’s”, and many foolish people vaguely on the left chipping in helpfully with “Can you prove he isn’t a little pro-Putin on Tuesdays?” There are not enough people on the left who understand that any section of the left must be fiercely defended against smear campaigns by the whole of the left. The Corbyn experience in Britain shows how crucial this is.

The aim of this first part has been to explain the importance of the exciting left election campaign of the France Insoumise, which is generally underplayed on the international left. In part two, I will look at Mélenchon’s vision of foreign policy, of left patriotism, and some other places where Marxists have important disagreements with him.

John Mullen is a Marxist activist in the Paris region, and a supporter of the France Insoumise. His political website is here.

Footnotes

1 You can find online, in English, the Table of Contents of the 2017 version of the programme, which gives an impression of its nature and tone.

2 For reasons which have mostly to do with how the French language works, the best translation of “La France Insoumise” is “France in revolt” not “France unbowed”. Firstly, “soumis” and “insoumis” are relatively everyday words in French, whereas “bowed” and “unbowed” are not, in English. More importantly, “France unbowed” suggests the whole of France is referred to, whereas “la France Insoumise” can refer to that part of the French nation which is in revolt. This is why you can see terms such as “La France vaccinée”… ( word for word “vaccinated France”…) to speak of that section of French people who are vaccinated, or “La France syndiquée” (“unionized France”) to speak of those in France who are members of trade unions.

4 These were mentioned by Marx as early as 1850.

5 At least 200,000 people saw it in French cinemas.

6 Two and a half hours of the Green candidate here and of Jean-Luc Mélenchon here.

7 Leading member of the New Anticapitalist Party, Olivier Besancenot, in this interview for example.

To stop the war we need political clarity

Nearly 20 years after the great mobilisations against the Iraq war, the Left is now dangerously divided. Where did it all go wrong?


01/03/2022

A war is always a moment of truth, and it is truly shocking to see so many (former) comrades collapse like a deck of cards under the impact of events. In these last few days I’ve seen everything on the miserable world of social media, from calls to purge “Putinists” (whatever that is) from the Left to those who think of themselves as particularly radical for demanding harder sanctions against Russia (capital of course is against that, you see, so they think this gives their reckless calls for escalation an anti-capitalist flair).

Many are circulating an obscure letter by the proverbial Ukrainian leftist that accuses the “Western Left” of being in cahoots with Putin for pointing out that NATO is still a thing (there is probably also a proverbial Ukrainian leftist in the Donbass who is imploring us to support Putin`s invasion as a continuation of the Red Army’s assault on Berlin). Shocking as all of this is, however, understanding should come before judgement. Where did it all go wrong? Here’s a modest attempt in that direction.

Twenty years ago, we experienced a relative revival of the Left under the twin impact of both the alterglobalization movement as well as the movement against the war on Iraq. While it was easy to be against George W. and the neocons in this unipolar moment, it was not always easy to analytically discern the root causes of things like the “war on terror”.

A minority of us made the argument that the state and imperialism were still a thing, and that the fact that we now lived in a unipolar moment did not mean that the state was irrelevant or that challengers to this order would not ultimately appear. Indeed, we argued that the war on Iraq was not the result of neocon-groupthink but a badly organized flight forward to prevent the emergence of such challengers to US hegemony.

But a much significant proportion of those radicalized held on to another theoretical framework, based more or less on Toni Negri’s Empire. It argued that interstate rivalries were a thing of the past, and things like Iraq were merely police operations undertaken on behalf of a networked and neoliberalized global capitalist class (forgive the under-sophistication, but this general description holds true about the direction of the argument). It was Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism theory reloaded.

The political conclusions many drew were manifold. First, it was passé to talk about imperialism. If you did that, you were labelled an authoritarian Stalinist of the “primary/secondary contradiction”-variety. I remember a history professor during my first semester at uni in 2003, whose course basically consisted of praises to Empire as the “21st century’s Communist Manifesto”.

Another lesson was quite reformist in the literal sense – it was to support European integration as a benign project that merely needed to be reformed in a progressive direction. This was basically the line followed by Syriza, Die Linke, and others in Europe, with all the known consequences.

Accompanying Negri “domestically”, was Holloway`s Change the World Without Taking Power, a manual on how to turn your low impact on actual politics into a moral asset. Under the impact of Occupy, many Hollowayists would suddendly discover that politics matters after all and become self-declared left populists, but that’s another story.

Iraq was a disaster. It accelerated the process it sought to prevent. Regional powers were strengthened – Iran, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey, and others. The US overstretch meant others like Russia and China found a breathing space and could challenge the US up to a certain degree.

Then the 2008 war in Georgia happened. Market capitalist Russia could tolerate this much globally, but not in what it regarded as its own backyard – the post-Soviet space. It maintained its own sphere of influence there after 1991, with “peacekeeping” operations in the Caucausus, Moldavia and Central Asia.

Now, the US was encroaching on that space too, and was even dangling NATO membership to the Ukraine, the buffer zone between Russia and post-expansion NATO (as to why, check out Brezinski`s “Grand Chessboard” among others). Every Western action resulted in an increasingly assertive counterreaction, Crimea and Syria to name the most important ones.

I don’t know exactly what went on in the heads of those who thought imperialism was a thing of the past, but it looks like two thought processes kicked in, which are now merging into one. If the whole world was so decentered and networked, it didn’t really matter where you were. And if – channelling Holloway – your political impact on your own rulers was near zero, you had to denounce everything and everyone, become a propagandist or worse, hope your own rulers could be persuaded to do something about what you thought was wrong in this or that part of the globe.

So through the rabbit hole of social media we had those great exercises of moral blackmail against a “Western left”, or “tankies”, or what have you not, that clinged on to an archaic anti-imperialism. We were told, Russia was also “imperialist” (as if this was news for us), even as they called for imperialist no-fly zones in Syria and drew ridiculous analogies to the Spanish Civil War.

On the other hand, it looks like the processes of electoralism and institutionalization that many from the noughties generation went through got the better of them. If you make peace with the fact that your own political impact is close to zero, then what’s left is to opportunistically attach yourself to any kind of “popular” (i.e. manufactured) mood, hoping to become its progressive wing and win this election or enter that coalition in government. Politics transforms itself into mere marketing – “I’m also against NATO, but it’s not exactly what people care about at the moment”.

So, now we have many from that side who are shocked that Russia, an imperialist state, would do an imperialist thing. And this leads to those insane Paul Mason-types who pass as left-wing but call for strengthening the “nuclear deterrent”, to sound credible. AOC is calling for the authorization of military force (i.e. World War III) before congress, even as no serious US policymaker is contemplating this at the moment.

They effectively argue that, it’s not all imperialisms that should be condemned now; it’s that *only* Russian imperialism should be condemned. For some, Western countries are now flawless democracies and not imperialist any more, whereas other condemn NATO and Western imperialism solely in the abstract, fully detached from any analysis of the concrete situation unravelling in the Ukraine. Truly, their condemnations reveal themselves to be simply justifications for their “own” imperialism, except they don’t call it like that.

We live in dark times and darker times are still ahead. This senseless war should end immediately. We need disarmament and de-escalation on a European and global level. Solidarity and fighting our own rulers, whether in Washington, London, Berlin, Mumbai, Damascus, Kiev or Moscow, must prevail.