At 22/11/01 23:18 -0800, you wrote: >< http://www.thenation.com > >FEATURE STORY | Special Report > >Terrorism and Globalization >by DOUG HENWOOD
Doug's ability to "doubt everything" serves him well in this journalistic article which for the audience, may be more creative than coming up with pat correct answers. But to produce pat answers, which can only indicate one way that the momentum of the two discourses might unite - the transducer between poverty and terrorism is the murky role of the national bourgeoisie, that neither the left nor the right wish to analyse in any detail for their separate reasons. But it is clear the Al Qaida is a polymorphous organisation with an ideology and a structure that crucially in class terms can embrace members of the high intelligentsia, bourgeoisie dependent on the state capitalist sector of an oil economy, or more independent national bourgeois. The shifts in positions within these strata (almost too ill defined to be a class except in abstract terms) within Saudi Arabia, will be the crucial *indirect" fall out of the war in Afghanistan. While there is massive poverty and inequality on a world scale, ideologies like the primitive communistic monotheism of islam, will advance themselves to represent the confused interests of the dissatisfied national bourgeoisie outside the metropolitan capitalist homelands. Its reactionary confused nature and the way it strangely combines with 21st century features are a product of the unstable class position of this national bourgeoisie. And on a global scale the thrust of Doug's article, IMHO, is that indeed the agenda has to shift to a global one of what juridical and representative forms of global governance have sufficient authenticity and acceptance to be viable. It is vital therefore that the present war is criticised not from a pacifist point of view but from the point of view of its failings as a just war. For example only last night on BBC Newsnight the Liberal Democratic Defence spokesperson and the Conservative Defence spokesperson, both card carrying members of the Coalition against Terror, were falling out over this crucial question: if the CAT derives its legitimacy from the dangers of terrorism to everyone, will it not fundamentally damage the authenticity of the war if the Northern Alliance massacre 5000 non Aghan defenders of Konduz? The argument between Campbell and Jenkins mirrors in another form the crucial difference of emphasis within the CAT between the British and US positions. The global political agenda requires rather than anti-US imperialism an acceleration of the dynamics of global civil society in which the contradiction between Empire and Multitude will be resolved in the coming decades through management of global capital. Chris Burford London
