A New John Brown?

"If a new John Brown arose today -- fundamentalist, patriarchal, and yet devoted to the cause of racial equality, or anti-imperialism, environmentalism, or some other good cause -- and moreover employed "direct action" (which would be naturally called "terrorism") to advance the cause, how many leftists would hail him as a hero? Would he not be scorned on account of his less than enlightened views about women, homosexuals, and so on?" -- Suleman Sheikh

Looking for the Boss

Ever since I began working for Monthly Review, I've had a number of opportunities to see leftists display an attitude that one wouldn't expect from those who profess to stand for freedom, democracy, and the socialist way. The attitude in question basically is one of "I'm gonna complain to the boss if I don't see an employee jump when I tell her to." Today I had it spelled out by one such self-identified leftist, who wrote me: "Please also provide me with the contact details of your supervisor / line manager."

What It Takes to Make Keynes Work

John Ross wrote in the Guardian ("No Secrets to China's Success," 18 August 2009):

Keynes noted in the final chapter of his General Theory, in a point highly relevant to a situation where mass unemployment is again soaring, that "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment".

That "somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment" is impossible in a private sector-dominated economy. The decisive advantage China has in the present crisis is that it does not have to rely only on indirect means (reduction of interest rates, budget deficits etc) to attempt to reverse the plunging investment that is the driving force of this as with every major recession. China can use its large state-owned company sector to increase investment and instruct its state-owned banks to lend. That is why its economy is growing, while Alistair Darling is still pleading ineffectually for UK banks to increase their lending and while UK investment in housing and transport is plunging by 30% and more.

A good point.

The thing about Keynes is that you can make Keynes work but not under a normal capitalist state in a normal capitalist market economy. It takes something like (1) China's one-party state or (2) war economy (of not capital-intensive wars like today's Afghanistan and Iraq wars but labor-intensive wars of total mobilization subordinating capital and labor alike to the state, like WW2) or (3) the working class so awesomely powerful that it might as well go ahead and do socialism instead of Keynes.

That's what typical Keynesians and typical anti-Keynesians (either of the Marxist or of the capitalist liquidationist kind) don't understand.

OutRage!ous Censorship of "Gay Imperialism"

The reader of Critical Montages has long been familiar with the problem of Islamophobia in general and its unfortunate manifestations on the (broadly defined) Left in particular in the age of the "war on terror." The reader is also well acquainted with queer variants of it, such as attempts at gay-washing of Israel. Left-wing criticisms of these phenomena, especially by queers of color themselves, are indispensable to our struggle to displace the hegemony of liberal imperialism.

One such queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism," a collection of essays titled Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, however, is being censored in Britain, apparently by Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who evidently felt his sensationalist brand of activism and rhetoric ought to be above critical scrutiny and got the publisher of the book to take the book out of circulation. For more information about this OutRage!ous censorship, see:

• Johanna Rothe, "Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain" (MRZine, 15 October 2009)


• Aren Aizura, "Racism and the Censorship of 'Gay Imperialism'" (MRZine, 23 October 2009).


• Umut Erel and Christian Klesse, "Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality" (MRZine, 24 October 2009)

How can leftists beat this censorship? In addition to the actions recommended by Aren Aizura, I suggest a couple more, in the short term:

• Hold public forums to discuss the censorship of queer-of-color criticism of "gay imperialism."


• Open up your journals, classrooms, and so on (if you work in publishing, education, and related industries) to discussion of this problem.

In the long term, though, we need to work on creating a Queer Left, informed of Marxist Feminism, capable of discussing such questions as religion and sexuality in proper historical materialist fashion (i.e., supplying missing materialist foundations to Foucauldian critique of the dominant discourse on sexuality).

Notes on the Japanese Elections of 2009

Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity, which created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito, finally put an end to Japan's de facto one-party state on 30 August 2009. But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from 115 to 308 (the DPJ block now enjoys 322 seats, more than a two-thirds majority). The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party barely hanged onto the same numbers of seats that they had before the elections: 9 for the CP^* and 7 for the SDP. On the face of it, it is not a debacle for the Left like those suffered by Communists in India and Italy in the most recent elections. But, one of the items on the DPJ agenda is a plan to eliminate 80 proportional representation seats, and it just so happens that all the Communist representatives are elected to proportional representation seats.

Why did the Japanese Left fail to advance? Take a look at this video of the 21 August 2009 press conference of JCP Chaiman Shii Kazuo (which comes with English translation), and you'll get a clue.

JCP criticisms of the DPJ agenda are to the point more often than not (which you can see in more detail in 「国民が主人公」の新しい日本を -- 日本共産党の総選挙政策), but those criticisms don't amount to a compelling vision of a new socialist society that the party should be presenting.

The strongest point of the JCP criticisms of the DPJ is that the DPJ will pay for its promise to expand the social safety net, including the formerly excluded, by increasing the taxes on working-class incomes, leveling down the existing structures of entitlements such as pensions toward the new social minimums, decreasing public works and public-sector jobs, and so on, the trade-off that the DPJ will make inevitable given its refusal to tax big businesses and capitalists and to cut military spending.

But, in the process of making this point, the JCP ends up defending the old, such as tax exemptions for dependent spouses (usually housewives), which have discouraged many a woman from seeking full-time jobs since wives earning only part-time incomes (roughly up to 1,300,000 yen) are counted as dependents for the purpose of calculating taxes, insurance and pension contributions and benefits, etc. What's good for working-class families in material terms can be bad for working-class women looking to enhance their gender-bargaining power vis-a-vis men, and the structures of the Japanese welfare state that tacitly assume male family wages, lifetime monogamous marriages, female spousal dependency, etc. are textbook cases of the common class-gender contradiction under capitalism. This contradiction is intensifying as more and more Japanese women are clearly losing interest in marriage and childbearing, powerfully demonstrating their sharp rejection of the old gender settlement and silently erecting a strong demographic obstacle to the old methods of restoring economic growth. The JCP, or any other left-wing current in Japan, needs to offer women -- and young people in general -- a new socialist vision that addresses women as individuals in their own right and creates new networks of social solidarity other than biological families, rather than a maternalist Keynesian vision in which women are tacitly assumed to be, or become, or have been wives and mothers.

The same goes for the JCP's defense of the Peace Constitution. On one hand, any constitutional revision that the DPJ will put on the agenda will likely be one that pushes Japan onto the course that Germany took in the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, embarking on humanitarian imperialist adventures of its own, not just as a subordinate member of the US-led coalition of the willing. On the other hand, there is nothing democratic, let alone socialist, about defending the constitution that the occupier wrote for Japan, on which the Japanese people have not been allowed to vote. Socialists must present a new democratic vision for Japan. Why not a constitutional assembly in Japan, to write a new constitution as a step toward 21st century socialism?


* The proportion of the total vote for the Communists, however, registered a slight decline, from 7.25% to 7.03%.

"Saving the World's Women"

The entire issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend is dedicated to the idea of "Saving the World's Women," essentially prompting the reader to blame everything from poverty to terrorism on patriarchal men in the South and to regard aid and philanthropy from the North as the solution. Such an idea is fit only for satire, but the magazine presents it earnestly, as a new idea, as if the world hadn't been through centuries of tandem development of liberal feminism and imperialism.

What little sense of irony in the issue is found in a short piece on the phenomenon of feminist-hawk spam.

The idea of giving aid to "female deliverance" seems to give a lot of liberals of both sexes the same pleasure as the idea of buying aid for "male enhancement" gives to all too many men. The difference is that the former, unlike the latter, is not felt as a guilty pleasure but on the contrary as a righteous one, especially since it's entirely forgotten that, once upon a time, America paid the same type of fundamentalists -- now featured as dark villains in a new literary genre called R2P, which is part Gothic-novel, part captivity-narrative -- to fight a jihad, throwing acid on the faces of women and castrating men who were, or were seen to be, in favor of the Marxist Modern.

The Scandal of Privatization in Iran

Probably the worst thing that the Islamic Republic of Iran has done for its working people is to educate its young economists at "the most prestigious Western economics departments." The horror, the horror! It's not the Western fashion in clothing but economics that the IRI should have kept out, but, as Sohrab Behdad has argued, the idea of Islamic economics met its demise soon after its rise -- much like the idea of socialist economics, I may add.

Despite the resurgence of gharbzadegi in its economics, though, hardly any privatization worth its name has been going on in Iran: "a main buyer of government assets over the last decade has been the para-governmental sector, which includes state banks, government-linked investment and holding companies, religious foundations, and pension funds" (Mohammad Khiabani, "The Great Tehran Expo Privatization Scandal You've Never Heard Of").

That is largely thanks to the Western sanctions, I suspect. It is probably also thanks to the political culture of Iran. Get ten Iranians to speak up, and you'll probably get twenty contradictory opinions about how thing are and why they are as they are in Iran, at least about fifteen of which are conspiracy theories. Nothing changes very fast in a country like that.