We Need To Talk About Empire - Part 2

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Recent events in Gaza have appalled global audiences, as the wholesale slaughter of an ethnic group has met with pathetically muted criticism in the capitals of the west. The hypocrisy of those who talk about a rules based order has been exposed to the world as the nations who raced to destroy Libya on the pretext that Gaddaffi may carry out a massacre sit back whilst a hecatomb of victims are sacrificed to satiate Israel’s Moloch.

The significance of what we are seeing in Gaza goes far beyond Middle Eastern politics. Gaza is in fact acting as a psychopomp for the soul of a western civilisation which is in its final death throes, raging against the dying of the light.

Recently I have been reading an abridged edition of Arnold Toynbee’s magnum Opus  ‘A Study of History’. Toynbee writes of the rise and fall of civilisations and discusses at length the signs of a civilisation in decay. 

Toynbee argues that civilisations are often well into their decline even as they flex their military muscles and go on expanding towards their greatest extent. In fact, imperial expansion and militarism are regarded by him as symptoms of a civilisation in decline. He gives examples such as the Delian League (which to my mind seems very much like NATO), a military alliance which, having seen off its main threat (the Persian Empire playing the role of the Soviet Union), outlived its purpose, became hegemonic and dragged its allies into unnecessary and self destructive wars. Athens, the home of democracy, became Imperialist, militarist and ruthlessly murderous in its pursuit of its objectives, as illustrated by the Melian dialogue. Ultimately its swaggering aggression and boorish disregard for those around it led to its demise in the Peloponnesian wars, in a classic Greek tragedy of Hubris and Nemesis. NATO is getting to that point today. Civilisations in their senescence, according to Toynbee, attempt to hold things together through the creation of universal states. Think Washington consensus style globalisation. This stage is followed by their fall. 

Toynbee also talked of an internal and external proletariat that rise up to overthrow the civilisation at the end of its imperial phase. Gaza is a wake up call for those in the external proletariat that the Empire wished to place under the yoke of a New World Order. Just as Rome lost credibility with its failure to crush the Teutons at Teutoburg Forest, The US has lost credibility with its failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and now Gaza. You may ask why I refer to a US failure in a largely one way massacre inflicted by Israelis on Palestinians. Whilst it may be obvious that Israel is an appendage of the US centred empire, like NATO, it may not be so obvious why this is a catastrophic defeat for that empire, regardless of the outcome. That comes down to the impact this has had on the external proletariat, those who had previously gone along with an exploitative global system which sucked wealth from the periphery to the elites at its core. The sheer audacity of Hamas and the utterly brutal response, typical of those panicking that they are losing control, has emboldened the resistance. An external proletariat that was already resentful at the US use of trade dominance, its sanctions or threat of sanctions, its interference and undermining of their own democracies and sovereignty, has seen the last shreds of moral leadership ripped away from the US by its role in Gaza, and its soft power now lies in tatters. The BRICS countries have already begun charting a path around the dollar, SWIFT and the IMF and the trickle towards the exit of the US Imperial system has begun to turn into something more decisive. 

The external proletariat has turned. What of the internal proletariat?  This may take somewhat longer to turn. At present those who suffer most under the empire, the low paid, the precariat, the vulnerable, have not been well served by those who claim to act in their name, the mainstream left. The latter’s attitude towards a system which is clearly failing has been to defend the status quo (see Starmer’s recent praise of the Neo liberal turn ushered in by Thatcher for an example). They have made themselves irrelevant as the public become ever more disillusioned with a system which is increasingly and obviously failing them. 

Again, Toynbee throws light on where we now stand. He refers to formerly creative minority elites who were previously able to respond to society's needs by meeting its challenges, thereby ensuring their ability to get the masses to follow them. However, these elites ultimately hypnotise themselves and lose their ability to move forward as new challenges arise. Our elites created a managed democracy with public relations and propaganda but they started to believe their own stories and lost their ability to respond appropriately to new challenges. They got stuck in the story they told to justify the status quo, losing their creativity and simply recycling the mantras of neo liberal capitalism. Their thinking goes something like this - Capitalist markets are failing. What we need is more markets, more capitalism. In their sterility, the elites have moved from being a creative to merely a dominant minority. Lacking legitimacy and the ability to carry the masses with them, they resort to force and coercive control as the society moves towards its universal state phase. We have seen this since the end of the Cold War, with power being moved ever further away from the people and with freedoms ever more restricted. 

If ever there was a time for the left to be radical and creative it is now but they seem to be too compromised, too invested in the system to respond appropriately. Perhaps it is because of their fetishistic attachment to the state that they can't challenge the universal state that is emerging. The left needs to realise that the state is no longer their friend. It has been captured by corporate interests and it serves them, not the people. Toynbee sees a pattern emerging as small chiefdoms move to bigger ones and eventually to states; taxation changes its form and purpose from redistribution to tribute. This appears similar to the change we have seen as nation states have begun to mesh more closely with the dominant empire. The redistributive state as envisaged by social democracy has been replaced by a tributary state. We now pay record rates of tax but the burden of that taxation has been switched from those most able to bear it to the increasingly strained masses. The beneficiaries of that tax are the corporations whose business models in neoliberalism rely upon the guaranteed revenues state taxation through compulsion can provide. We are becoming a rentier/tributary economy where the masses are compelled by the state to do the bidding of its corporate masters.

In the dominant political discourse, it is only the libertarian and demagogic right which gives voice to critics of the state, even as the state serves the elite interests which are the power behind these demagogues. A restless and angry internal proletariat looks for a way out and despises the left for not offering one, turning to the populist right like Geert Wilders and Javier Millei, who at least seem to read their room in their rhetoric, if not their actions, which involve doubling down on everything which has ruined our economies and society. There does however seem to be a genuine desire in the internal proletariat who are voting for these figures to reject the universal state which the elites are attempting to impose on them.

Anarcho capitalism poses as a champion of such masses but refuses to acknowledge several issues which fatally undermine its position. As Toynbee notes, Industrialism’s impulse is naturally towards global markets and global governance. Capitalism requires a state and that state will increasingly fall under the sway of the monopolies which also naturally occur under capitalism. Those who rail against the ‘communist’ WEF cannot see that global state control over individuals' lives is the logical end point of undiluted capitalism.

After the fall of the Roman Empire there were a number of attempts to revive civilization through top down measures, attempts to recreate the empire rather than the Hellenic society which had flourished before the empire arrived on the scene in that civilisation’s decline. Toynbee points out that cultural revival came about through the bottom up agricultural reforms of the Benedictine movement ‘by invoking the individuals initiative through enlisting his religious enthusiasm’. Perhaps it is time for the left to turn its back on universal state approaches and pay more heed to the (genuine) anarchists. But perhaps the anarchists need to reexamine their attitude towards religion. Industrialism, materialism and atheism seem to have gone hand in hand as we constructed the capitalist utilitarian straight jacket we now live within. At present there is no viable alternative for the internal proletariat of the empire to rally around. Neither is there the spiritual drive which would be required to overcome the sense of helplessness of those faced with the all powerful machinery of empire. But as the external proletariat start to challenge that power and demonstrate that it is not so omnipotent after all, such things may come. Gaza is just the beginning.