A trap set for protesters Michael Hardt Friday February 21, 2003 The Guardian
full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,899852,00.html
HARDT: Corresponding in part to the new US anti-Europeanism, there is today in Europe and across the world a growing anti-Americanism. In particular, the coordinated protests last weekend against the war were animated by various kinds of anti-Americanism - and that is inevitable. The US government has left no doubt that it is the author of this war and so protest against the war must, inevitably, be also protest against the United States.
REPLY: What is the evidence of this anti-Americanism? Carrying around a picture of George W. Bush with bloody fangs or something? Indeed, this business of "anti-Americanism" is mainly a preoccupation of the red-baiting left or the reactionary bourgeois press as exemplified by this quote from the Murdoch press last Sunday:
"Some on the old left see the problem. The issue is not Blair or spin, it's not even Bush, it's tyranny. Veterans like Arnold Wesker and Salman Rushdie and, most trenchantly, Julie Burchill - I'll come back to her - are pro-war. The Wesker-Rushdie line is that Saddam's reign has been so terrible for the people of Iraq that common humanity alone justifies war. Wesker has for a long time advocated the setting up of an International Benign Force - an army that would be sent in to sort out the bad guys. But, failing that, reflex anti-Americanism - or, indeed, anti-Blairism - shouldn't trap anybody into pig-headed pacifism when a brief act of belligerence can free the people."
If this is the sort of thing that Hardt is alluding to, he's wasting our time per usual.
HARDT: The globalisation protest movements were far superior to the anti-war movements in this regard. They not only recognised the complex and plural nature of the forces that dominate capitalist globalisation today - the dominant nation states, certainly, but also the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the major corporations, and so forth - but they imagined an alternative, democratic globalisation consisting of plural exchanges across national and regional borders based on equality and freedom.
REPLY: But the one thing they did not recognize was that imperialism was the nature of the beast, rather than unregulated capital flows which would be restrained by a Tobin Tax or some other such nonsense. What irks the good professor is that the Starbucks window-breakers have been marginalized in the current phase of the struggle and that brontosaurus-Marxists like the WWP, the British SWP et al are taking the initiative.
HARDT: One of the great achievements of the globalisation protest movements, in other words, has been to put an end to thinking of politics as a contest among nations or blocs of nations. Internationalism has been reinvented as a politics of global network connections with a global vision of possible futures. In this context, anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism no longer make sense.
REPLY: "…global network connections with a global vision of possible futures?" Sounds like a Verizon commercial.
HARDT: It is unfortunate but inevitable that much of the energies that had been active in the globalisation protests have now at least temporarily been redirected against the war. We need to oppose this war, but we must also look beyond it and avoid being drawn into the trap of its narrow political logic. While opposing the war we must maintain the expansive political vision and open horizons that the globalisation movements have achieved. We can leave to Bush, Chirac, Blair, and Schröder the tired game of anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism.
REPLY: It is unfortunate but inevitable that much of the energies that had been active in the globalisation protests have now at least temporarily been redirected against the war? Get used to it professor, we are living in an epoch of wars, civil wars and revolution. Time to put the Spinoza back on the shelf and reread Lenin--and for some first people, including Hardt based on the evidence, to read him for the first time.
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