22.12.2011

What kind of commitment?

Mike Belbin takes a look at the life of Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

“I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist" - June 2010 New York Times

The one question the obituaries, certainly in the liberal press, felt compelled to discuss was whether the columnist and writer who died last week of cancer was on the left or the right - even whether he remained a Trotskyist in his attitude or had become fully neoconservative. Either that or they echoed Hitchens himself when he quoted Orwell to the effect that it did not matter whether you were left or right, but whether you were “democratic or totalitarian”.

In his time Hitchens took great pride in appearing detached from sides. He attempted to demolish the reputations of Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein. He supported the reunification of Ireland and took a ‘pro-life’ stand on abortion. He opposed Zionism as “an ethno-nationalist, quasi-religious ideology”, but considered that the Palestinian struggle was now dominated by Hamas so that even the withdrawal of Israel would not satisfy them. His main enemy increasingly became religion, “the main source of hatred in the world”, issuer of fatwa and holy bull.

The style of his writing was very much that of a cool but cheeky observer committed to certain enlightenment principles, but not to parties or movements. The trouble was that he could not maintain this juggling of detachment indefinitely. From the Gulf War (1990) onwards, he began to relate his principles to active people and movements. Those of us who think he made the wrong choice - the support of imperialist intervention characterised as “anti-fascism” - are still faced, even in CH’s own ‘fall’ into conservatism, with the question of whether side-taking compromises one’s position as a writer or thinker: what Julien Benda called la trahison des clercs (1927) and Orwell called a ‘touch of the propagandist’. Is it safest for our integrity, as many seem to believe, especially in post-empire Britain, to stay politically non-aligned - to be independent, detached, ‘uncommitted’?

Going to the contrary

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born in Portsmouth on April 13 1949. His mother, Yvonne, had said that “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it”. The young Hitchens eventually reached Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, gateway to a career in power. Instead, he says he was “bowled over” by such books as Darkness at noon, Tawney’s Religion and the rise of capitalism and the works of George Orwell.

He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967, along with a majority of Labour students, over what Hitchens called “prime minister Harold Wilson’s contemptible support for the war in Vietnam”. He met Peter Sedgwick, translator of Victor Serge, and wrote as a “correspondent” for International Socialism, when the Socialist Workers Party was still called the International Socialists. IS, of course, had a distinctive detachment of its own, refusing to define ‘communist’ states as non-capitalist and proclaiming the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism’.

As an anti-Stalinist, Hitchens left IS and joined “a small, but growing, post-Trotskyist, Luxemburgist sect” (Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton was also a member). The young revolutionary journalist was not shy either of being arrested and assaulted on various political protests. There is a photo of him in his memoir Hitch-22 (2010) being led away by police after an anti-apartheid demo.

After Oxford, he briefly joined the Times Higher Education Supplement, serving as social science editor. A much more amenable berth proved to be the New Statesman, where he became a drinking buddy of authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. It was at the ‘Staggers’ that he acquired a reputation as a fierce leftwinger, aggressively attacking such targets as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam war and the Roman Catholic church.

But by 1979 he claimed he had secretly favoured Thatcher’s Tories, though he had abstained from voting. Later he would more explicitly support the British war with “fascist” Argentina over the Falkland Islands. In 1981 he moved to the United States, to write for The Nation, ‘flagship’ of the US left, where he penned urbane attacks on Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.

There may have been many small ‘turning points’ for Hitchens, like the Falklands war. But a major emotional one came in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the ambivalent attitude of many on the left towards offending Muslims and non-intervention in the Middle East. Soon after, of course, came the first Gulf War in 1991, when he visited to the Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurds became a symbol to Hitchens, despite evidence of red flags and their treatment of women, for an actually existing opposition to tyranny.

Soon after he became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, writing 10 columns a year. On this gig he was known around Washington as a robust drinker, risky smoker and attender of celebrity parties. Getting to know insiders like Paul Wolfowitz can be justified as getting close to the enemy all the better to expose them. But after 9/11 and on foreign policy this closeness became alignment. His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq gained Hitchens a broader readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the “top 100 public intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

He told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say, ‘I am a socialist’. He accused all socialists of ceasing to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had indeed for Hitchens become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as “innovative and internationalist”. He suggested that this meant he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral totalitarians.

You might recognise this as a familiar terminus for some ex-Marxists - that is, if they identify a worldwide alternative with either the Comintern or the still extant possibility of a Trotskyist ‘political revolution’ in the ‘workers’ states’. This may remind some of particular ex-whatevers who find that, once their belief in mass change fails, they join centrist parties, ‘dynamic’ finance houses and even the Murdoch press. Contrary to legend, it is not the considered revolutionary, but the romantic rebel, who goes on to become the conservative, from Wordsworth onwards.

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen in 2007, his 58th birthday. In June 2010, his book tour for Hitch-22 was cut short so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer. On December 15 2011, Christopher Hitchens died from pneumonia, a complication of his cancer, in Houston, Texas.

The first I heard of the event was when I switched on the Today programme and found them talking about someone in the past tense. “He wrote …” said one contributor (it could have been Ian McEwan on the line from somewhere). Registering the tense, I waited to discover whether they were referring to Christopher Hitchens and this was confirmed a few seconds later.

The pitfalls of commitment

Hitchens would have denied that he had departed the left - by no means a unitary grouping, to say the least, of course. Nevertheless, he began to attack certain general left positions from 1989 onwards, after what he called the “tepid reaction” of those in the west following ayatollah Khomeini’s issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie.

Furthermore, his visit to the Kurds in northern Iraq after the Gulf War gave him a living example of a resistance movement that a socialist should support after the decline of revolutionary hopes. The September 11 attacks strengthened his alignment with an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he dubbed “fascism with an Islamic face”.

However, his “contrarian” stance against “group think” can be seen at its best in No-one left to lie to (1999) - his book on the Clintons and Clintonistas. Having admitted that there were always scurrilous rape claims made against the president, Hitchens turns to the other cases: “What are the chances,” he writes, that three women, all of them “respectable” Democrats and none of them known to each other, “would confect or invent almost identical experiences which they did not want to make public?” In this work Hitchens scrupulously presents previously unconnected testimony and at all times shows an awareness of possible objections.

However, another part of his style, growing with his new alignment, was of a more general name-calling and guilt by association. “Peaceniks”, “tepid” lefties and “cowardly” anti-war activists go unnamed (though he has had his dig at Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). Anyone’s reservations that forcing Arabs to be free would result in massive casualties and resistance of all kinds are dismissed. Not to be pro-intervention is “cowardice”. Casualties in Clinton’s missile attack on the Sudan medicine factory or even the war in Iraq must not be allowed to “outweigh” the atrocity of 9/11. On the other hand, no complexities about the US (and British) alliance with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia or totalitarian China must throw into doubt the White House and Pentagon’s commitment to democracy. Proclaiming the “good side” of the west - eg, Hitchens’ right to speak against Henry Kissinger - is more important than rejecting the “bad side” of capitalism and imperialism.

If Hitchens was any kind of Marxist, why did he not look to the complex totality? A strange kind of dialectician who does not discuss balance of forces or acknowledge that there are class and state interests. For example, in 1991 one Bush (the father) irritated him by not going far enough into Saddam’s Iraq. In 2003 the son gained his approval by remedying this. Did Hitchens ever raise the issue of why one had pulled back, leaving a ‘friendly’ dictatorship in place, while the other had been able to jump at the chance, so stoking American ‘pride’? Surely the elder Bush was not a tepid lefty?

Even those who argued a form of ‘Neither Washington nor Baghdad’ were simply not sufficiently “anti-fascist” for Hitchens. So the gadfly, the Washington Voltaire, was not happy to remain detached. He wanted to side with some kind of tendency to improve the world. He found it in the neocons, however saddened he was by some of their methods.

There is something in the approach of humans to the world, in language itself probably (which associates and distinguishes, creates and projects), that encourages us to go beyond, to fabricate a vision of better things, even if this simply means us on top. This will to a better world is also shown in art, happy endings and wishful thinking of all kinds (see on this topic, Ernst Bloch’s Principle of hope or Fredric Jameson in the Political unconscious). To be perfect is to be divine; to be human is to be utopian. Hitchens was most human, most involved in being human, by taking sides for the best possible world. But in his opposition to his main enemy, the religious, he gave little time to the fact that many religious people justify themselves not with holy writ, but rather with the approval of humanist ends.

Belief in what?

There are preachers who declare that it is not enough to base morality on ideas of human rights and universal human welfare. But many believers do, even if they argue that this is the historical result of a particular religious tradition. Most people go to religion for solace and bonding, not for mystical experience or theology - human values.

More broadly, there has been a winnowing out of inherited ethics, based on a developing and still inadequately applied consensus about human welfare. For example, society is still based on the supposition that it is wrong to kill (except under special circumstances, which are still debated), but no longer observes the biblical prohibition on eating shellfish or affirms that a menstruating woman must be secluded. Even those who call for a change back,a return to an ethos ‘anchored’ in holy writ, still do so in the main on the basis that this will be good for society and humanity, or some part of it. Not many just say, ‘The gods desire it.’ With many such believer-humanists we may make common cause, especially in the face of the material onslaught of ‘austerity’ and the glaring injustice of the ‘bonus’ gap.

A critically aware urge to utopia is also pertinent. Marx and Engels, for example, were famous for opposing idealism and prescriptiveness as debilitating to a global movement that aimed to liberate the future (seethe Communist manifesto). But they still praised the utopian socialists’ aspirations and were not above such speculations themselves, though usually in response to others’ initiatives (in The civil war in France or Critique of the Gotha programme).

And on the way to utopia, if people are wary of ‘totalitarian’ organisations and losing their integrity in such a movement, this can be the basis not of detachment, but a cooperation to make such a movement one which does not demand total sacrifice of mind. The Leninist method of democratic centralism was supposed to achieve this: by the right to factions (and independent identities in united fronts), debate on the basis of a few shared demands, unity on agreed action.

Christopher Hitchens himself might have agreed that championing a better design for a transformative agency (a party, if you like) might be a good start, promoting such principles as make for the kind of organisation in which free-thinking people can come together. Not choosing sides, but choosing how to side with others.