21.05.1998

No to ‘sentimental anti-imperialism’

Blair wants to relieve symptoms by easing debt burden

The fanfare surrounding the ‘Group of Eight’ meeting in Birmingham last weekend saw Tony Blair being treated as some sort of hero. According to The Guardian/Jubilee 2000 alliance, he could be relied upon to pull out all the stops to win G8agreement on debt relief to the ‘third world’. Not surprisingly then, her majesty’s minister Clare Short got a standing ovation when she addressed the church-organised, “60,000”-strong ‘human chain’ around the G8 meeting. They came to support New Labour, not to threaten New Labour. So do we have a case of an imperialist government recognising its ‘responsibility’ for world hunger and misery?

Hardly. New Labour and Blair are peddling sentimental ‘anti-imperialism’ for the sake of cheap popularity. The G8 agreed statement was more honest about why debt relief is on its agenda: “Globalisation has the power to bring immense economic benefits to all countries and people. But the Asian financial crisis has revealed that there are potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the global financial system” (quoted in The Guardian May 18). Capitalism is not in good shape. There is a consensus amongst the ‘experts’ of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that financial crises and therefore political crises are to be expected with increasing frequency.

The debts of the most undeveloped countries as such are not the problem. Economically they are peripheral. Debts allow the world capitalist metabolism to extract the surplus labour from these countries, but they also represent a collective burden. Credits were given in the main for political - ie, anti-Soviet/anti-communist - reasons. Kleptocracies like Mobutu’s Zaire were rewarded by the west. Hence the masses were robbed twice over. First by the regime. Second by debt repayments. Financial crisis turns into a revolutionary crisis however.

The much celebrated ‘Mauritius mandate’ of chancellor Gordon Brown attempted to ease the burden - and therefor crisis potential - of the ‘heavily indebted poorer countries’ (HIPC) by cancelling debts and advancing new loans. Only six countries have so far been declared eligible. This extra money is, like all IMF financial ‘aid’, linked to an austere economic programme which includes cuts in social spending, wages and public investment and wholesale privatisation.

It is of course workers and the poorest who lose their jobs and suffer under such programmes. It is they who go hungry from the axing of subsidies on staple foods. It is they who cannot afford health and education. Such neo-liberal programmes are fundamentally inhuman. They serve dead labour, not living labour.

But with the support of The Guardian and the Jubilee 2000 campaign Tony Blair is able to sell British involvement with such schemes as acts of altruism. The Guardian ran a week-long campaign on ‘new slavery’ and published a ‘special eight-page pull-out’ with the evocative title, ‘breaking the chains’. And of course there was a long interview with Blair who insultingly told us: “It’s about taking the values of the left - social justice, solidarity, community, democracy, liberty - and recasting them and reshaping them for the new world” (The Guardian May 15).Short likewise talked of how, having lost an empire, Britain had at last found a role in working for justice in the ‘developing’ world. Syrupy notions no doubt heartily endorsed by Jubilee 2000 (an amalgam of 70 liberal and ‘third world’ organisations, which takes its name from the primitive biblical idea of a ‘jubilee’ every 50 years when debts were cancelled). The campaign claims to be for “economic justice”, not charity (quoted in The Guardian May 15).

Try to define “justice”. That is the problem about arguing with such abstractions - there is no single valid definition. Everybody believes in humanity, love and of course justice as long as they can have their own versions. Nobody considers themselves champions of falsehood, hate and injustice.

Arguing with moral abstractions means substituting a material analysis of social conditions with what Engels described as an “eternal truth” - a feature of ‘sentimental socialism’, just as much as ‘sentimental anti-imperialism’. Engels wrote that “from a scientific standpoint, this appeal to morality and justice does not help us an inch further; moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom” (F Engels MECW Vol 37, p320).

The danger of adopting sentimentalism lies mainly in its denial of historical materialism - the rejection of the fact that societies have always been changed through class struggle. Class struggle, which humanises the exploited, is labelled by such pious moralisers as an expression of ‘hate’. ‘Love’ negates struggle. ‘Humanity’ negates class. We are all the same.

Of course it is an ‘injustice’ that 18,000 people starve to death every single day. But if gut feeling is not linked to a real analysis, the response to this injustice is the abstract demand to “cancel the debts”. Ignoring the fact that this is the programme of a section of capital and that the main beneficiaries of such debt relief would be the ruling cliques who leech off the backs of the impoverished masses - not the masses themselves.

The question is not ‘will the debts be cancelled?’, but who willcancel them: international capital, or the people themselves through revolution.

Kathrin Maurer