THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD- part TWO
Created | Updated Feb 5, 2015
THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET PROJECT
But, as a Marxist, much of Hobsbawm’s sense of living through a “Golden Age” followed by a “Landslide” was associated with the emergence during the Second World War of two large multi-national, multi-racial and multi-cultural Federal Republican “Superpowers”, the USA and the USSR, both in their different ways committed to building a “new world” that would be more immune to the pressures exerted by “savage Capitalism” because of new and developing Political Economies that could take advantage of the latest fruits of the evolution of Human knowledge, the Civilization of Science and Technology. And Hobsbawm’s “Golden Age” was essentially a return to the Balance of Power tradition as eventually the USA and the USSR accepted to live in a divided world of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in a great experiment that would show which of the two had the better “scientific model”, the one that placed the emphasis on LIBERTY or the one that prioritized EQUALITY.
It was a ‘struggle for hearts and minds’ in which each side was under pressure at home and abroad to show that it did not sacrifice all other Human Rights for the sake of the one it prioritised: and so the Capitalist world had to respond to demands that Liberty should be tempered by Equality, and ‘vice versa’ in the Communist world. Even by the early 1970s, however, the “We do not know where we are going” condition applied to both sides of the Cold War, the Opec Oil Crisis providing the first major pocket of “global fog” that had “the experts” reduced to merely tapping their way out of a crisis, and eventually both sides were forced to accept the need for radical re-structuring as their Economic systems lost dynamic growth potential that was needed to power their experimental Social constructs.
Both the Capitalist and Communist parts of “Western Civilization” were obliged to cut down on the suppressions of Liberty that had been involved in the pursuit of Equality, in order to try to release more dynamic and spontaneous forces that would kick-start Economic growth and put their projects ‘back on track’.
But, though Hobsbawm could write that a future could not be forged “by prolonging the past or the present”, his whole life’s work was dedicated to learning “Lessons from History”: and the ‘Communist experiment’ was very vulnerable, even, or perhaps especially, to the Marxist interpretation of History and to Western accusations that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”. For in truth the Soviet Union was produced by the Bolshevik ‘coup d’etat’ that took over the Russian Empire in 1917, sought to assert Red Army control over the Tsarist Empire after the defeat of Germany and the Versailles Settlement that had created new or re-born nation states across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, only managing to accomplish this through a combination of the deal made with Nazi Germany in 1939 and the “liberation” of other territories in 1945 that was followed by military occupation that gave way to puppet regimes. And in all of this the early idealism of a true “People’s Democracy” based on revolutionary ‘Soviets’ had given way to one-party tyranny that proved once again Lord Acton’s old maxim that “All power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
THE TIDE IN THE AFFAIRS OF MAN
Meanwhile the forces that had favoured the imperial outreach of “Western Civilization” had changed, when both the First and Second World Wars had been followed by the promotion of anti-imperialism and the promotion of Nation States, supported by international agencies and mechanisms. None of those forces had been more powerful than the Nineteenth Century “Eastern Question”, though that was only one zone of disquiet over the incredible expansion of the Russian Empire. In the Far East it spread into the zone of the decayed Chinese Empire and in Central Asia it sought to expand into that of Moghul India and its neighbours.
But, in many ways, those ancient 5000 year old empires were much more stable than the Islamic Empire, whose leading state the Turkish Empire was Disraeli’s “the sick man of Europe”, finding it hard to hold together the large Islamic world over which held the supreme authority of the Caliphate. It was because of fears that the Islamic world would be unable to hold its ground and resist the remorseless expansion of Russia that Britain and France fought the Crimean War in the 1850s: and British and French policy towards the Islamic Empire, as their foreign was more or less universally, was to encourage the break-up of large Empires which were almost equally threatening through their weakness as their power, while encouraging the modernization of the core state.
For the moment, however, this attempt to shape the tide of History has been more successful in India and China than in the Islamic world, for those two most populous states on Earth have emerged from the experience of Imperialism and Colonialism as the world’s two most “power-house” economies having taken from Western Civilization what it found of value and making just one more in a long history of dynastic adjustments.
But then this was the intention of “all men of goodwill”, who went to India, a goal specifically expressed by T.B. Macaulay in his speech on the government of India in 1833: for both were part of an almost mythical ‘fabulous Orient’ that was a relic from Civilizations that had worked out the secrets of longevity and wealth creation that did not call for constant wars launched to rob and exploit others that had been the dream and aspiration that had prompted Adam Smith to write “The Wealth of Nations.”
But “Western Civilization’s” experiences with Islam, with which it was only too familiar, were very different: and by the Nineteenth Century there was already too much history between “Christendom” and Islam that is essential background knowledge for anyone wishing to understand the ‘Charlie Hebdo affair’ or the current appeal of Islamic terrorism and the Islamic State to young Muslims, for whom the idea of an Islamic order in place of Hobsbawm’s disordered reality that offers no future, merely an endless tapping forward through global fog, has all the appeal of a fast-track, even if savage, ‘escape route’ from purgatory. And this is especially the case when History is “cherry-picked” in the Marxist Scientific methodology that Dr. Hobsbawm’s applied with some brilliance.
It has been observed often enough, the Scientific Method progresses by means of constructing some hypothetical idea of how things happening, constructing an intellectual model, and then trying to find evidence that seems to prove it. In a recent work Professor Carlson of Virginia University expressed this very well: “Inventors, as well as scientists, are always looking for confirmatory evidence- that the device or the experiment actually works. Put more precisely, both inventors and scientists are seeking proof that the ideas they have in their minds are confirmed by the action of objects and forces in the material world.” (page 300)
It was an approach that made it possible for Karl Marx to plough through stock of books in the British Library to find the material evidence to support revolutionary thesis of class war, oppression and exploitation both within states where the ruling classes enrich themselves at the expense of the working classes, and throughout their empires where they may well conspire with the indigenous ruling elite.
THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO ISLAM
The weakness of the full Marxist analysis when applied to Islam is the questionable relevance of the most fundamental principal that Marx embraced, that is David Ricardo’s “Labour theory of value”, which says that all value in things is really is due to the work of those who actually produced it”: for it is impossible for someone considering the purely material world to ignore that the revelatory experiences of the Prophet Mohamed were shaped and informed by his own life experience, which, prior to his taking up his ministry, was spent working in the camel-train industry that took goods produced in the wonderful and exotic Civilizations and cultures of Asia and the Pacific islands from the dead-end of the Red Sea and into the dead-end Mediterranean Sea, where such goods from had long been marketed going back to the great days of Ancient Greece and Rome.
The journeys of Mohamed seem to have taken him often enough to Jerusalem from Mecca, both of them ancient centres of pilgrimage often suffering from the temptation and tendency to turn Holy Places into “a den of thieves”. In the case of Temple at Jerusalem it was a place where Jesus replied to someone, who asked a leading question, “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s”. Jesus had asked to see what money his questioner had in his pocket, either the Roman money for doing general everyday transactions, or the special temple money that was only used for religious purposes. Most people probably had more of the former than the latter and, in short, Jesus was pointing to the fact that the region at the time was benefitting from ‘the Peace’ of the Roman Emperor Augustus, conditions that were conducive to a Gospel of love and peace, as opposed to the terrorist violence of groups like the ‘sicarii’, who hoped to drive the Romans out.
More than five hundred years later Mahomed was born into the age after the Fall of Rome and the descent into the Dark Ages in what we now call Europe, as well as much of the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Then too there seemed to be no system or order, and therefore a great deal of unpredictability for all those like the Arabs who had made a living through their unique ability to act as “the middle men” between the Mediterranean and Asia: and, still in purely Marxist material terms, through the force of Islam the Prophet Mohamed was able to create a new Civilization centred on Mecca that was not dissimilar to that of Ancient Greece, with Athens at its heart, or the Roman Empire.
But, perhaps even more than those Civilizations, the Islamic World seems to have owed much its power and prosperity to its virtually monopolistic control of inter-continental traffic and trade between the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, because of what happened when their monopoly was broken. For eventually the real or feared consequences of these monopoly powers under the control of an Ottoman Turkish Empire that threatened Europe with further conquests and submissions persuaded Europeans to try to “cut out the middle man” and deal directly with the producing countries: and when the “Narrow Seas” around Great Britain formed a new nexus of trade routes that offered all the advantages of direct water transport the Islamic world was denied its “stock in trade” and declined inexorably until European technology and investment put the Middle East ‘back on the map’ with the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the German-Turkish Berlin to Baghdad Railway.
But that just renewed the advantage of location, Adam Smith’s ‘Land’. And eventually in during Dr. Hobsbawm’s “Golden Age”, when “The Left” raised global issues of anti-imperialism and the just division of rewards flowing from these great ventures between (a) Capital, that had largely come from the Imperialist “West”, (b) Labour, the bulk of which had been unskilled and local, (c) Land, issues that naturally became more important once Islamic countries became independent and began to consider the justice of Socialist/Communist schemes of Nationalization of assets built by “Imperialist” Capital. So as early as the mid-1950s the whole question of the Nationalisation of the Suez Canal, after the shareholders had been able to profit from their investment for 100 years, led to the Suez Crisis of 1956.
It was, however, the Oil Revolution that gave much of the region of the old Islamic Empire a new global importance of a totally different order to those important freight routes, for oil has allowed transport the freedom of the air, the sea and the land. And the BP crisis in ‘Persia’, which resulted in the establishment of the regime of the Shah, was an early sign of things to come. In these disordered and difficult last decades the whole question of the legitimacy of the existing governmental regime and the possibilities offered to the masses by regime change that would put the their oil wealth at their service has energised the Islamic world even more, if that is possible, than these issues energised Scotland in the Year of the Referendum, 2014, or Venezuela of the Chavez regime and its successor.
And posterity may yet conclude that the event that really marked end of “The Short Twentieth Century” was not the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That event already had a certain inevitability after the Cold War had become in many ways a “North Atlantic” affair with the Wall really only a undefended relic of the past just waiting for someone to start to knock it down. But, on the other hand, the August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq that raised all those aforementioned oil issues, seems to have come ‘out of the blue’, with Saddam Hussein quickly seizing on the possibilities of the changing times and the possibility that the former “superpowers” lacked the courage of their former convictions. It is interesting to reflect that Ronald Reagan was presumably primed to ask Mrs. Thatcher not to take military action over the Falklands Invasion, and her memoirs note that on the day that he announced her resignation as Conservative Leader and Prime Minister to the Cabinet the Cabinet meeting had also doubled the British military capability in the Gulf region.
It does seem possible that George Bush Senior may have wanted to be able “to wear the trousers” over the Kuwait crisis: and, as my 15-16 year old pupils from London’s Banglatown insisted throughout the whole First Gulf War, that what the USA was most interested in was not the legalities and illegalities involved, but the US Oil Interests. As the children of families from Bangladesh they were not angry, merely philosophical and worldly wise in the way that the British Empire went about calling into being new states with new frontiers and new constitutions, and how the British liked to back the sovereign ownership rights of cooperative “Native Rulers”, who thereby returned the compliment of having their fabulous personal wealth guaranteed by British power by signing lucrative contracts with British companies.
