25 May 2004

“The paralysis of the US leftist intellectuals, their inability to express solidarity with the Iraqi resistance is a disease which afflicts all “leftist” intellectuals in the colonial countries. They are fearful of the problem (the colonial war) and fearful of the resolution (national liberation). In the end, the comforts and freedoms they enjoy, the university applause and adulation they receive in the colonial motherland weighs more heavily than the mental costs of a straightforward declaration of support for the revolutionary liberation movements. They resort to phony “moral equivalences”, against the war and against the “fundamentalists”, the “terrorists”, the ‘whoever’ who is engaged in their own self-emancipation and has not paid sufficient attention to the self-appointed guardians of Western Democratic Values. It is not difficult to understand the absence of solidarity with liberation movements among the progressive intellectuals in the imperial countries: they too have been colonized, mentally and materially.” – James Petras, Left’s failure to support Iraqi resistance

Perhaps the question should be, what is the Left? There is something of an irony in the fact that as the imperium stares directly into the face of defeat in Iraq, the Left is bereft of an alternative beyond pulling out and a condemnation (of sorts) of imperialism’s latest adventure. It has been suggested to me that this is because we are suffering a crisis of confidence in the viability of the socialist project. In other words, aside from platitudes, we have no alternative to offer.

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