The fucking Second International all over again
So, I was going to write something about how being part of the pro-war left leads to endorsing strange and repugnant right-wing positions. But I’m too enraged to actually make an argument, and anyway, I think it’s a case of, if you have to ask, you’ll never know. Anyone who can link approvingly to this interview with Christopher Hitchens just Doesn’t Fucking Get It. I’m with Vyshinsky here – let’s shoot the pro-war left like the mad dogs they are (Ken MacLeod is as enraged as I am, but more coherent with it).
I’ve just seen that Norman Geras has linked to this post. Curses; I’d been hoping he wouldn’t notice it, ever since Chris Brooke pointed out what what I’d actually written meant (as opposed to what I had intended). There is, somewhere, a genuine point in the above, and I think it’s this: that certain arguments adduced in favour of the Iraq war by supporters on the left represent such a massive missunderstanding of the contemporary political landscape that attempting to argue with them would involve as large a mutual translation of ideologies as arguing with groups who are radically opposed to the left, something which is different from (and, I suspect, generally less fruitful than) a fraternal discussion amongst those who share significant premises.
But there is a larger question of tone here, as well. Norman Geras assumes too quickly, I think, that a blog post is a straightforward ‘serious’ use of language (to use Austin’s term); that because I post saying that I am enraged, I mean to communicate that I am, in fact, enraged. Now, he uses his blog in precisely such a way, and his posts are, as a rule, extended, clearly carefully worked out statements of or enquiries into some position or other. And he’s very good at it; however, that’s not how I use this site. Rather, posts here generally attempt to crystalise a particular element of what I happen to be thinking at any particular time (I don’t think this is unusual – at least half of the blogs in my list of links do the same).
So Norman Geras is wrong to interpret this post as having advocated that the pro-war left should be shot like mad dogs, and also wrong to interpret either this post, or my comment at the Virtual Stoa, as containing arguments that might establish the correctness of such a course of action. What struck me (and still strikes me) as interesting enough to have been worth noting in this post is the emotional response I have, on one level, to certain debates among the left. I’m surprised by the element of fierceness in my reaction, and I wonder if it suggests that there were, largely unrealised until the Iraq war, different understandings within the left so severe as to make speaking of ‘the left’ essentially meaningless. A serious and interesting question, but not one my post was supposed to be an answer to, but merely to raise. I think this could be understood from reading the rest of this site; but I suppose it is a little much to ask people to engage in careful contextual considerations while apparently threatening to shoot them like mad dogs.
While we discuss issues of seriousness, I’m not sure if Norman is serious about his suggestion of discussing such things over a beer, but I rather hope he is, and that the opportunity arises one day, as I would like to talk to him about Marxism and morality (when I’ve finished the Grundrisse and re-read his book on the subject); I suspect the divisions on the left reside, somehere, within questions of ethics. At that level of abstraction, too, we might be able to find enough common ground to figure out a left wing that supporters and opponents of the war in Iraq can comfortably (or not too uncomfortably) be on. And I promise to make no attempt to shoot him like a mad dog.
Having mulled this over some more, I’m feeling rather bemused and a tiny bit belligerent (my favourite combination of emotions). I’m really not at all sure what the point of Norman’s post was. He quotes this post and makes some remarks based on (incorrectly, but not unreasonably) interpreting my linking to a post on his blog as a claim on my part that he endorses a particular position and should therefore be shot like a mad dog. He then goes on to paraphrase a comment of mine to a post at The Virtual Stoa, while ignoring the most germane point (my explanation that I had not intended my link to be interpreted in the way Chris Brooke had interpreted it, and in which Norman now interprets it) and looking in the comment for further argument vis-a-vis shooting him like a mad dog, which, I would have thought, it’s farily obvious the comment wasn’t intended to supply (the comment being a clarification of the connections between the different elements of my post, not an amplification of the position I was toying with). So, beyond the fact that Norman objects to people advocating that he be shot, I’m not clear as to what anyone it supposed to learn from the exchange.
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