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<dd><font size=3>(while still written from a Western perspective, some
interesting points)<br><br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=5>Missing Truth and Irony in
Bin-Laden’s Critique of Capitalism<br>
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<dd><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=2>by Paul Street; October 12,
2007</b> <br><br>
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<dd>Just because someone has a lot of blood and a criminal historical
record on their hands, that doesn’t mean they can’t accurately identify
some key facts of social and political reality. Take Leon
Trotsky. He ordered the state murder of hundreds of revolutionary
Soviet soldiers during and after the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion
(1) He collaborated with Lenin in the rapid abolition of
Soviet workers’ control and endorsed a plan of forced collectivization
and “primitive socialist accumulation” that might well have out-Stalined
Joseph Stalin himself. <br><br>
<dd>He also penned brilliant analyses and critiques of Russian Tsarism,
western capitalism-imperialism, Soviet bureaucracy and foreign policy,
European politics, and German fascism. As Isaac Deutscher noted,
speaking of the last subject area, “like no one else, and much earlier
than anyone,” Trotsky “grasped the destructive delirium with which
National Socialism was to burst upon the world. His commentaries on the
German situation, written between 1930 and 1933,...stand out as a cool,
clinical analysis and forecast of the stupendous phenomenon of [fascist]
social psychopathology and of its consequences”(2). <br><br>
<dd>Another if much less intellectually impressive example is the
neo-feudal and arch-patriarchal butcher Osama bin-Laden. Contrary
to the paranoid and dysfunctional fantasies of the 9/11 conspiracy crowd
(1), bin-Laden really is the leading perpetrator behind the criminal
jetliner attacks of September 2001. I have nothing but contempt for his
criminal actions and the extremist Islamic fundamentalism that has
informed his bloody career from before he worked for the American Empire
(against the Soviet Union) through his current position as that Empire’s
supposed Public Enemy No.1. I also personally reject his faith in the
existence of God (“Allah”) and his narcissistic belief that he can
justify mass murder by reference to divine authority – a belief he shares
with fellow fundamentalist, messianic, and mass-murderous son of
petroleum wealth George W. Bush <br><br>
<dd>At the same time, I’ve got to give bin-Laden some basic credit for
out-performing the majority of the United States’ intelligentsia by
mentioning some elementary facts of American, Western and world life and
history during his September 7th (2007) video Address to the American
People. By bin-Laden’s account, “talk of the rights of man and freedom
are lies produced by the White House and its allies in Europe to deceive
humans, take control of their destinies and subjugate them. Those with
real power and influence” in the U.S., bin-Laden added, “are those with
the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major
corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional,
there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment – and there isn't any – in
the Democrats' failure to stop the war. And you're the ones who have the
saying which goes, ‘Money talks.’” <br><br>
<dd>Bin-Laden noted that U.S. “democracy” had shown its powerlessness by
“sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the
major corporations. And with that,” he added, in a passage that crudely
and clumsily speaks some rather basic truths U.S. journalists and
intellectuals dare not publicly acknowledge for fear of offending their
business class masters: <br><br>
<dd>“it has become clear to all that [the corporations] are the real
tyrannical terrorists. In fact, the life of all of mankind is in danger
because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the
emissions of the factories of the major corporations, yet despite that,
the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on
not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistics
speaks of the death and displacement of the millions of human beings
because of that, especially in Africa. This greatest of plagues and most
dangerous of threats to the lives of humans is taking place in an
accelerating fashion as the world is being dominated by the democratic
system, which confirms its massive failure to protect humans and their
interests from the greed and avarice of the major corporations and their
representatives. And despite this brazen attack on the people, the
leaders of the West – especially Bush, Blair Sarkozy and Brown – still
talk about freedom and human rights with a flagrant disregard for the
intellects of human beings. So is there a form of terrorism stronger,
clearer and more dangerous than this? This is why I tell you: as you
liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and
feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles
and attrition of the capitalist system. If you were to ponder it well,
you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than
your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the
entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of
‘globalization’ in order to protect democracy.”<br><br>
<dd>Dominant U.S. media immediately ridiculed bin-Laden’s Address for
advancing supposedly preposterous notions about U.S. and Western politics
and policy. As far as “mainstream” U.S. reporters and commentators were
concerned, bin-Laden’s “ludicrous rant” against “the capitalist system”
and its Frankenstein creations the corporations was proof that he was out
of touch with reality. <br><br>
<dd>Some talking and scribbling U.S. heads also felt compelled to comment
on the absurdity of a supposed Islamist holy warrior seeming to “channel
[atheist] Marxism” by denouncing the glorious “free market system.”
<br><br>
<dd>But the real problem with bin-Laden’s criticism of U.S. and global
capitalism and the giant corporate wealth concentrations that rule
western “democracy” wasn’t that it was wrong or even all that bizarre. As
is well known within and beyond the U.S. but unmentionable in dominant
(so-called “mainstream”) corporate U.S. media, bin-Laden’s “rant” all-
too accurately captured harsh American and global political-economic
realities. <br><br>
<dd>The U.S. is the “best democracy that money can [and did] buy.”
It’s political system really does confer wildly disproportionately
political and policy influence on the United States’ heavily
corporate-connected top 1 percent , which own half the nation’s wealth
and an equivalent if not higher share of its politicians and
policymakers. <br><br>
<dd>The United States’ corporate elite actually does undermine the
Democratic Party’s ability and willingness to act in accord with the
majority antiwar sentiment that bin-Laden noted. <br><br>
<dd>Much of the nation’s corporate elite really is profiting hand over
first from a militaristic and imperial foreign policy that imposes steep
costs on the U.S. populace and especially on the nation’s working
majority and lower classes, who lack the economic resources to
meaningfully influence politicians in either of the nation’s two dominant
corporate-imperial parties. <br><br>
<dd>Corporations like Boeing, Raytheon, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin,
Exxon, General Dynamics, General Electric really are great “tyrannical
terrorists” who regularly destroy lives and livable ecology (as with
global warming), undermine democracy, generate poverty and concentrate
wealth and power at home and abroad. <br><br>
<dd>The broad populace of the West really is largely enslaved to the
cancerous and authoritarian nightmare that is the profit-addicted,
privileged-serving, human and environment-assaulting capitalist system.
<br><br>
<dd>And that system really is “turn[ing] the entire world into a fiefdom
of the major corporations under the label of ‘globalization’ in order to
protect democracy.” <br><br>
<dd>All of that and much more is all too tragically true, sad to say –
something that is well understood by much if not most of the morally and
politically cognizant human race. And for what it’s worth, that
understanding is deeply consistent with the world’s leading religious
traditions (Islam included), all of which have always contained strong
ethical objections to the savage wealth/class inequality, economic
exploitation and narcissistic commercialism that lay at the dark heart of
the deadly bourgeois mode of production, exchange, governance, and
“life.” <br><br>
<dd>No, the real problem with bin-Laden’s critique of American capitalism
is that his jetliner attacks drastically strengthened the power of U.S.
military and other corporations by giving the arch-plutocrat Bush II a
great pretext to consolidate and concentrate the wealth and power of the
privileged few. Nine Eleven was a great opportunity for the U.S.
state-capitalist elite on numerous levels. The imperial “defense”
corporations and the oil giants have enjoyed a remarkable wartime Profit
Surge while Bush-Cheney have used the “war on terror” to invade Iraq and
identify resistance to the Republicans’ arch-plutocratic agenda with a
treasonous failure to “support the troops” and with opposition to
National Security. <br><br>
<dd>Nine Eleven was a “disaster-capitalist” (4) windfall for bin-Laden’s
“real tyrannical terrorists.” It was major blow to those struggling to
advance social justice, democracy and economic equality within and beyond
the U.S. <br><br>
<dd>The other irony is that bin-Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists
owe much of their power in the Middle East to the global march of western
capitalism-imperialism. As Gilbert Achcar shows in his marvelous book The
Clash of Barbarism: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder
(New York: Monthly Review, 2002), the rise of militant, anti-Western
Islamic fundamentalism is rooted in U.S. policies aimed at the control of
Middle Eastern oil reserves and in Western-imposed global-capitalist
(neoliberal) processes of class and public-sector disintegration.
These policies and processes have provided fertile recruiting ground for
al Qaeda and its many imitators. Resentment abhors a vacuum and bin Laden
et al. have garnered a membership windfall from the misery that negative
(top down corporate and state-capitalist) globalization has imposed on
Middle Eastern masses who – thanks in no small part to U.S. policy - no
longer possess relevant secular and left-nationalist outlets for their
democratic and social aspirations. <br><br>
<dd>On the crackpot American right, the usual vicious red-baiting voices
of reaction took bin-Laden’s criticism of western capitalism and his
positive references to Noam Chomsky (praised for “speaking sober words of
advice prior to” the invasion of Iraq) to prove that the Western Left and
bin-Laden “share the same ideology.” Last we looked, however,
neither Chomsky nor other leading western antiwar and anti-imperial
voices have joined bin-Laden in calling for the conversion of the
American masses to Islam. And bin-Laden has yet to embrace the causes of
radical workers’ control, participatory democracy, or women’s rights.
<br><br>
<dd>The leading figure of the historical Western left Karl Marx was
critical of religious faith but deeply attuned to the role of economic
exploitation and capitalist alienation in making religion necessary to
desperate masses the world over. Capitalism, Marx and Frederick
Engels noted in 1848 (in a passage that seems highly relevant more than a
century and half later), “has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal
ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left no other bond
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash
payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor,
of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water
of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into
exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free
Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and
political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation” (5). <br><br>
<dd>This passage from The Communist Manifesto provides some interesting
context for understanding feudal bin-Laden’s problem with
capitalism. It also helps explain the success bin-Laden and
other Islamic fundamentalist have experienced recruiting followers in the
Middle East, where western capitalism-imperialism has long ironically
encouraged the persistence of “religious fervor” and “chivalrous
enthusiasm” by undermining any and all Left-secular responses to the
soulless march of exchange value, egotistical calculation, and
socioeconomic dispossession and where the persistence of feudal and
patriarchal regimes and values have long served the United States’
dominant interest in the region – the control of a single,
super-strategic material of great of critical imperial relevance: Middle
Eastern oil (6). <br><br>
<dd>Paul Street is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa City, IA
and Chicago, IL. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America
and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm); Racial Oppression in
the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and
Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America
(New York: Routledge, 2005. Paul can be reached at
paulstreet99@yahoo.com. <br><br>
</b>
<dd>Notes<br><br>
<dd>1. Paul Avrich, Kronsdadt 1921 (New York, 1970),
pp. 144-145, 211; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophert Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921
(New York, 1954), pp. 511-512.<br><br>
<dd>2. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against German
Fascism [New York: Pathfinder, 1970]).<br><br>
<dd>3. For a useful science- and fact-based antidote to
9/11 conspiracy theories, see Popular Mechanics, Debunking 9/11 Myths:
Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts (New York: Hearst,
2006). <br><br>
<dd>4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Age of
Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007). <br><br>
<dd>5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist
Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948 [1848]),
p.11.<br><br>
<dd>6. As Gilbert Achcar noted in 1997, “of all the
major geopolitical regions, the Arab world is the only one in which a
relative [neoliberal] reduction of the state’s influence on the economy –
inaugurated by Anwar Sadat in Egypt as long ago as the early 1970s – has
not seen an accompanying reduction of its control over politics. It is
also the only one where civil society has been unable to wrest political
expression from bureaucratic and despotic state control...How are we to
explain this Arab anomaly? And. More important, why is it so blatantly
tolerated [really supported and protected, P.S.] by those same
superpowers that preach democracy to the rest of the planet? Two basic
factors explain this anomaly of Arab despotism. The first is the
curse of oil...The perpetuation, and in some cases installation, by the
Western governments of premodern tribal dynasties in the oil states of
the Arab peninsula contrasted strongly with colonialism’s project of
overturning traditional structures in other parts of the world and
setting up models emulating political modernity. The ‘civilizing
mission’ of the West in the establishment of state institutions did not
extend to these countries. On the contrary. Here the project
was to consolidate backwardness in order to guarantee unfettered
exploitation of hydrocarbon resources by the imperial powers.” Gilbert
Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New world
Disorder (New York: Monthly Review, 2002), p. 45. <br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
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