Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on foreign policy from the blog Base and Superstructure. Unfortunately left-wing foreign policy is largely locked out of the mainstream press and culture. These posts are mostly overviews of foreign policy issues in specific parts of the world.
A possible war with Syria rarely dominates the headlines, but it just as rarely strays too far from them. The situation has persisted since the Syrian civil war began in 2011. How did this happen, and where will it lead?
I’ll briefly review the history before diving into the policy details. The U.S.’s Syria policy fits well into the bipartisan foreign policy consensus, but it also reveals fault lines between Donald Trump and the Democrats, among other areas.
The political left doesn’t know what to make of Venezuela, just as it doesn’t know what to make of a lot of foreign policy issues. Ken Livingstone asserted Hugo Chávez should’ve killed the oligarchs. That’s one view. George Ciccariello-Maher, a more careful analyst, also lapses into overheated rhetoric. But if there’s anything like a left consensus, it looks like this: vague critique of the current administration standing next to critique of any US-backed war. As Michael Walzer would surely say, it’s the vague consensus at work.
I’d like to get less vague. I’ll give an overview of the situation in Venezuela, and I’ll honor a bit of the spirit of Livingstone’s flippant remark without reproducing its content. What’s the insight here? It’s this: the Bolivarian Revolution, ’21st Century Socialism’ in name, recreated many of the problems of 20th century socialism in practice. And I’m talking here about the social democratic varieties, not the Leninist or Stalinist ones.
But all things in good time. First there’s our point of departure. Everyone agrees things are fucked up in Venezuela, but they don’t agree how or why. What’s fucked up? Why did it happen? Will Venezuela fix it?
I’ll tackle some of these questions on the way to our destination.
Foreign policy is pretty central both to why I first became interested in politics and how I think leftist politics should work. And I think issues in Latin America are among the world’s most interesting and important. Yet I haven’t written much about Latin America in this blog. I’ll aim to correct that a bit with some discussion of Bolivia.
But, first, I want to say a bit about the special difficulties of writing about US policy in Latin America, generally, and in Bolivia, specifically. In the social media-inspired era of having an opinion about literally every little thing, I might bring a bit of a retro attitude toward Bolivia: fear of making a mistake. Fear, perhaps, that my own methods aren’t well suited to Bolivia.
In the US, leftist attitudes toward immigration vary. At least, they did for much of the 20th century. Now, ‘open borders’ is an idea on the table across the US left in a way it hasn’t been previously. Much of the reason for this is reaction to the US’s increasingly draconian immigration policies since 9/11.
But there are also key issues of leftist theory and practice involved. Suzy Lee’s recent article in Catalyst provides a helpful frame for thinking about this. You can find the article here. I’ll sketch out Lee’s leftist argument for open borders before laying out some of the further issues and challenges.
The Gaza-Israel conflict is heating up as the Israeli elections approach. And Netanyahu is threatening to annex the West Bank. I’ve been following the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict pretty closely for about a decade and a half, but I rarely post about it.
Why?
There’s no point in beating around the bush. Most writing on the topic is terrible. Politics, religion, and/or ideology lead authors to ignore background conditions, distort historical facts, and misstate even the most basic aspects of the conflict. As a result, writing about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is often pointless.
This is all rather polite. What I’m saying is that commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is full of some of the most untruthful, disingenuous, asinine nonsense imaginable. Many people are simply talking out of their ass.
Not that this wasn’t a fun intro to write.
My aims here are pretty modest. I’ll give a very basic orientation to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Sort of like what I did with North Korea. Who’s involved? What’s it about? I’m not going to do much in the way of offering solutions. That said, I think getting clear about what’s going on is a great start. And it’ll leave most people better off than where they started.
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