Simon Wells reviews John Rees' Imperialism and resistance, Routledge 2006, pp265, £14.99

The author hopes that “the analysis contained in this book will contribute to our understanding of the new imperial age” (p9).

However, Imperialism and resistance has been several years in gestation, during the time when the anti-war movement has been at its height. There are many other books that have analysed this period and are on the increasingly packed shelves of your local bookshop. To stand out, there has to be a hook, and this is John Rees himself, a leading “spokesman for the anti-war movement” (foreword). He announces in the first couple of pages that he was there at the beginning of the Stop the War Coalition, just as he was there at the end of the cold war (he recounts the time he criss-crossed the Berlin Wall talking to and interviewing activists).

But Imperialism and resistance is primarily an extended statement by the leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, yet there is no reference to the SWP or his membership of its executive throughout the book’s 265 pages. Nevertheless, it was to be expected that it contains justifications for the SWP’s rightist perspective and trajectory that jar with what it purports to stand for.

War for oil
Comrade Rees bases his analysis on what he identifies as the “three titans” of the modern world: “The power of nation-states, of the international economy and the power of working people … Many of the most important events … take place at the intersection where these three forces collide” (p3). The book is divided into seven chapters and the first four - ‘Arms and America’, ‘US economic power in the age of globalisation’, ‘Oil and empire’ and ‘Globalisation and inequality’ - describe the current global situation in order to set the scene for the final three.

In these first chapters he correctly pinpoints America’s declining economic power, combined with its relative military strength, as the factor responsible for “much of the instability of the contemporary international order” (p8). However, the US cannot easily fulfil its imperial ambitions through military might, as evidenced by Iraq. More generally, as the US has been the hegemon power of the world - even more so since the end of the cold war - the failure of Iraq is also a reflection of the crisis of capitalism. To compensate, democratic rights have been eroded, as states attempt to reconcile the contradiction of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the inherent need to maintain social stability, on the other. The final three chapters - ‘Their democracy and ours’, ‘War and ideology’ and ‘Resisting imperialism’ - deal with the contending ideologies that this situation throws up.

Rees is good at disabusing myths people might have held with the end of the cold war. The common assumption was that arms spending would fall dramatically and a social democratic peace would prevail. In fact, he gives us the facts and the figures to show the reverse: that the balance of power has tipped in America’s favour with by far the largest spending on arms as a proportion of gross national product. The objectives of the US, he says, are now driven by the ascendant neoconservatives, who aim to control vast swathes of the world economy, particularly the Eurasian land mass.

He comments on the rise of the post-war American economy and the cracks that started to show at the beginning of the 1970s with an economic slump. He elucidates on the shock therapies imposed on Russia and how it ruined and impoverished the country. He analyses the challenge of Europe, China and the threat in America’s backyard from countries such as Venezuela and concludes that there is an inherent systemic instability exacerbated by the downturn in the world economy. This instability, he says, is nowhere more evident than in the Middle East.

It is a common perception among the left that the reason the US went into Iraq was because of oil. This is not a sufficient explanation, but for comrade Rees it is central and in chapter 3, ‘Oil and empire’, he describes how control of oil, particularly in the Middle East, is at the heart of US strategy to overcome or offset its economic decline. There is a link, then, to the previous chapters, but not in relation to the ideological vacuum that arose following the defeat of ‘communism’. The ‘war on terror’ which accompanied the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq aims to fill that vacuum, allowing the US to discipline the working class and pump massive sums of money into the means of war as a way of countering or delaying the crisis of US capital.

In chapter four, ‘Globalisation and inequality’, Rees addresses the consequences for the state of the increased fluidity with which transnational corporations move around the globe: “In the industrialised democracies the changing function of the state - less ‘welfare provider’, more ‘pro-business facilitator’ - has hollowed out the democratic aspects of the state machine” (p96). As these states have progressively abandoned welfarism, there is an increasing polarisation between the experiences of upper and lower classes - “the lives of working people have become harder, coarser, more difficult” (p104). Yet the leaders of social democracy have become more and more “pro-market and business-friendly” (p117).

Move to left?
However, according to comrade Rees, “The 1990s marked a general move to the left in popular consciousness and therefore exposed the gap between the New Labourism-type of social democracy and the mass of their traditional supporters” (p116). Some of those supporters will drift to rightwing nationalism, but many voters have abandoned the ballot box, disillusioned with reformist ideas.

It does, of course, require something of a leap in logic to regard the continuous drop in voter turnout as evidence of “a general move to the left in popular consciousness”. If there really was such a move to the left, surely we could expect large-scale recruitment to working class organisations, not least the SWP itself, whose membership has, if anything, fallen steadily during this period. It is true that the period of capitalist triumphalism following the demise of the Soviet Union has come to an end, but, despite the mass anti-war movement, increased electoral abstentionism is, by and large, a reflection of despair.

Despite this claimed leftward shift, Labourism is far from dead, says comrade Rees: “The undermining of reformism involves a longer process utilising united front tactics to win layers of workers away from established Labour-type politics” (p196). Therefore, “What is necessary to turn the crisis of Labourism into a step forward in the working class is to actively replace reformist organisation with an alternative … a superior set of ideas embodied in an alternative organisation” (p125). This would be Respect, then, with its old Labour reformist ideas and old Labour bureaucratic organisation?

Islamism
In chapter six, ‘War and ideology’, Rees discusses the islamophobia that is part and parcel of the ‘war on terror’ and condemns (mostly unnamed) sections of the left for buying into it. True, he says, “in the Indian sub-continent and in the Middle East some islamic currents have been or are the declared and bitter enemies of the left”. But, since islam is “overwhelmingly the religion of the poor” and “muslims are overwhelmingly on the receiving end of the new imperialism”, this “should give many on the left pause for thought before joining in with the establishment demonisation of muslims”. However, according to comrade Rees, “Plenty on the left draw … the conclusion that islam is in general an enemy of the left either worse than or equal to the local and international ruling classes. It follows, of course, that the left cannot ally itself with any islamic current.” In a footnote comrade Rees gives as an example Samir Amin, who “has argued that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is part of the ruling class” (pp208-09).

For our part, we do not claim that “islam” is “either worse than or equal to” the imperialist ruling classes. While we do not shy away from stating the obvious - that islamism is a reactionary, anti-working class ideology - we are clear that our main enemy is at home. This means that we certainly do not rule out tactical alliances with anybody (no, not even “part of the ruling class” if circumstances dictate) in order to defeat that main enemy and further the cause of the working class. What we never do, however, is paint such temporary allies in the colours of socialism and progressive democracy - which is what Rees is forced to do, as he seems to think that alliances with reactionaries are impermissible in principle. What we object to is not such alliances per se, but the deliberate ditching or softening of elements of the socialist programme in order to accommodate them.

In this connection, there is an interesting section at the end of the chapter titled ‘From Arab nationalism to islamic revival’. Comrade Rees explains the failure of communist and nationalist currents in the Middle East, leading to the rise of islamism. He notes that the Middle East communist parties “imagined that a section of the indigenous capitalist class was opposed to the imperialist structure and therefore tended to subordinate their policies to the need, as they saw it, to create a cross-class popular front” (p88-89).

This is spot on, but stands in glaring contradiction to the SWP’s own popular frontism. This paper has pointed out on numerous occasions that the organisation is in the process of liquidating its revolutionism through its strategy in Respect (which, like the SWP, does not get a mention in Imperialism and resistance) of appealing to a largely phantom right wing in the shape of the muslim establishment. No doubt the SWP would argue that the mosque and organisations such as the Muslim Association of Britain can be characterised as petty bourgeois (and “opposed to the imperialist structure”?), but MAB has an unmistakably bourgeois leadership and programme. Either way, the SWP has been prepared to forge a joint party with such elements, within which - in classical popular front style - it is the right that exerts a disproportionate influence over policy, leading to the dropping or watering down of core working class demands such as gay rights, the right to choose an abortion, open borders, secularism and working class socialism itself.

This, then, is the basis of our opposition to the SWP’s rightist trajectory. However, instead of debating such key questions of Marxist principle, comrade Rees directs his fire at left liberals and unnamed leftwing islamophobes, hoping to tar the likes of the CPGB with the same brush. One of his weapons is to state unequivocally that islamophobia (which, broadly defined, can include criticism of islam itself, it seems) is a form of racism, because “the ideological offensive that followed 9/11 redefined the religion as a racial category” (p209). We in the CPGB are familiar with this device - unable to counter our criticisms of its opportunism, the SWP resorts to slandering us with implied claims of racism (as if that were a fundamental political category rather than a distorted form of class politics).

Another contradiction. 9/11 set the agenda for the state’s attack on muslims and yet in the UK the state introduces legislation outlawing ‘religious hatred’ in order to ‘protect muslims’. Comrade Rees is forthright in condemning the imperialist hypocrisy of claiming to fight a ‘war for democracy’ while at the same time methodically undermining hard-won democratic rights in the capitalist countries. Yet the SWP supported the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill - a direct attack on the democratic right to free speech, which, at the end of the day, will be used against our class.

Anti-imperialism
The first paragraph of the final chapter, ‘Resisting imperialism’, covers a multitude of ‘antis’ - we are anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation and anti-war. But what is the basis of this? The chapter starts with the assertion that, “The rise of the new imperialism has called forth a new anti-imperialism” (p121). Rees dates the beginning of this “new anti-imperialism” to the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation conference. He argues that the protestors who gathered at Seattle represented a culmination of pent-up anti-capitalist feeling and that subsequent events such as the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre attempted to express the new mood. This overlooks the fact that the “new” anti-capitalist ‘movement’ is in fact largely led by the old left - both social democratic and ‘official’ communist.

However, comrade Rees contends that the events of 9/11 changed the dynamic and reshaped this protest movement - the anti-capitalist slogans became anti-war slogans and the Stop the War Coalition was born. Rees tells us that the anti-war movement is “nominally about a single issue” but is in fact a broad critique of the “economic and political imperatives of the new imperialism” (p222). Yet time after time any intervention within the STWC aimed at trying to arm it with a positive programme is snuffed out by the SWP and its allies. Without a programme that goes beyond comrade Rees’s vague and to all intents and purposes formless “broad critique” the movement does not have a hope of stopping the latest act of imperialist aggression, let alone mounting a serious challenge to the system itself.

The SWP has also ensured that criticisms of the regimes that imperialism has in its sights are suppressed or muted. Again the SWP prefers to paint the islamic republic of Iran and even the Taliban in sympathetic, understanding and almost progressive colours. While Rees stops short of openly urging support for reactionary regimes threatened by imperialism, he claims that when “states that are opposed to the major powers defeat the imperial powers it weakens the whole imperial system” (p231). Not necessarily. Although the 1979 Iranian revolution undoubtedly represented a setback for imperialism, it also dealt progressive forces a devastating blow. Iran remains part of the world system of capital, and the only force that can genuinely defeat that system on a permanent basis - the working class - was itself considerably weakened.

Comrade Rees notes that “In struggles between despotic and undemocratic leaders of small nations and their own working people socialists take sides.” But then he adds: “The only danger for the anti-war movement in adopting this stance is when criticism of the leaders of small nations is elevated to the point where no distinction is made between them and the leaders of the major imperial powers” (p232).

Once again, he is targeting the pro-war or soft left that “effectively sided with imperialism” here. Using this disingenuous method, comrade Rees avoids responding to principled leftwing, anti-imperialist opponents such as the CPGB, who insist on calling our secondary enemies by their correct name, and ends up excusing or even apologising for those “despotic and undemocratic leaders”.

Democracy
Chapter five, ‘Their democracy and ours’, covers a large section of the book - over 70 pages. There is a lot of historical material covered here that is useful to comrades on the edge of the workers’ movement who are unfamiliar with its role in struggling for democracy and resisting undemocratic traditions and institutions. But the one conclusion drawn by comrade Rees seems to be the need for permanent revolution - to guide revolutionary upheavals in the direction of socialism.

For comrade Rees, however, it appears the “democratic revolution” in itself is not really our business - far from identifying the struggle for democracy as central in the fight for working class power, he does not even raise any democratic demands that we ought to pursue.

As I have pointed out, comrade Rees does not mention the SWP once. Although, of course, there is much in Imperialism and resistance that will provide comrades with ammunition in their own day-to-day struggles, it ends up reflecting, despite comrade Rees’s intentions, the contradictions of the SWP itself - not least its economistic disdain for genuine democracy, its opportunist drift to the right and consequent liquidationism.