Letter: WOMD (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

WOMD

Dear Editors

The two big lies which Blair and Bush used to “justify” the destruction of Iraq’s civilisation and infrastructure and the slaughter of thousands of its citizens are now for all to see.

Lie number one was possession of weapons of mass destruction (WOMD) by Iraq.  Before the war, the regime couldn’t win.  Complying with demands to destroy stocks of WOMD would “prove” it had been in breach of UN resolution since 1991.  Non destruction of alleged stocks would “prove” it continued to be in defiance.

Now it is Blair’s and Bush’s turn to be hanged by their logic.  If after invading and occupying Iraq, there still cannot find WOMD, then what shocking, disgusting deceit have they spun.  If they do find any evidence of WOMD, then lie number two is also torn to shreds, that Saddam’s regime was a dangerous threat to its neighbours and even to Britain and America.  If ever they were going to be used, it was when the life of the regime itself and the  capital Baghdad were under threat from the new crusaders.  They were not.

However, I would not at all be surprised to learn of a little “gardening” activity by the occupation forces in the next few days or weeks and the “discovery” of suspicious munitions, workshops and documents.  Watch out too for the next big lies that most of the evidence was slipped out to Syria, alongwith much of the Iraqi leadership, as part of the softening up process for preparing the public for the next stage of this permanent murderous war.

The real possessors of WOMD are the ruling elites of Britain and America.  They not only have them, they are using them to inflict agonising pain and suffering and carnage on ordinary working people.  We too need to declare a war on such people and their weapons, but a class war, a real war of liberation, a war for emancipation, a war for socialism.

Andrew Northall,

 Isham, Northants

Editorial: The new reality (2003)

Editorial from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The war is now over. Inevitably, given the technological superiority of the US armed forces and their complete control of the air, the US – with token support from Britain – won. Their trained killers were able to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi soldiers and, if they got in the way, Iraqi civilians too, including women and children. Their warplanes not only rained down bombs on defenceless Iraqi soldiers – a repeat of the fire-bombing of the defeated and retreating Iraqi army in 1991 – but also on perfectly usable and empty office buildings. And they allowed the looting of hospitals and of museums containing items that were the cultural heritage of all humanity.

But this, the supporters of the war said in their defence, is inevitable in a war. And they are right. War does bring nothing but death and destruction to ordinary people. This for a cause that is never theirs. This was blindingly obvious in this war with the issue at stake being control of the world’s second biggest reserves of oil and of a country in which the US could establish military bases in strategic reach of both the Middle East and Caspian Sea oilfields. At the same time the US was able to demonstrate to potential rivals, such as France, Germany, Russia and China, that it is the Alpha Male in the world capitalist jungle and that this is the “new reality” they would be advised to take account of.

The US propaganda machine, echoed by the Bush and Blair Broadcasting Corporation and other media outlets, are proclaiming that the Iraqi people have been “liberated” and are now “free”. Certainly the Saddam regime, a brutal state-capitalist dictatorship, has been overthrown, but what is going to replace it? In the first instance, a military dictatorship under a retired US general. In time, when the occupying forces are satisfied that it is safe to do so, power will be transferred to a puppet regime of their choosing. This will be no easy task, but that’s their problem.

The emergence of even a capitalist political democracy in Iraq seems improbable. More likely is the rule of hereditary warlords in the North and of Islamic fundamentalists in the South. But that will be acceptable to the US as long as it ensures stability. The fig-leaf that this was a war to establish “democracy” in Iraq will then be seen to have been just that.

The Iraqi people – the workers in the towns, the peasants in the countryside – will merely have exchanged one set of rulers for another. Having seen what happens when a state machine collapses – workers help themselves to some of the products that were ultimately produced by their labour – the priority of any new regime is going to be holding “the masses” down, ensuring that they accept their poverty and deprivation, without kicking too much against the pricks. At the same time, the new regime will be required to make the assets of the overthrown state-capitalist regime available for looting by Western, mainly US, corporation and contractors.

But this is not the end of the story. Iraq could well be only the first of such wars to overthrow regimes considered to threaten the vital economic interest of the US. That’s the “new reality”, though the US government will be hoping that the fate of the Saddam regime will be an object lesson to any other state that might be tempted to challenge US interests and that the threat of war will suffice to make them back down.

In any event, the world is going to continue to be a dangerous place. That capitalism continues to be a war-prone society has been proved yet again. So has the urgent need for world socialism so that wars, the threat of war and preparation for war can become things of the past. It’s the only way to lasting world peace.

Crime - legal and illegal (2003)

From the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime, according to the Collins Dictionary, is “an act or omission punishable by law”. This definition is more or less what you would expect to find but nevertheless it's somewhat chilling. Nowhere is there any requirement for this “act or omission” to be either benevolent or malevolent; pro-human or anti-human. It simply has to be “prohibited by law”.

So what actually is “law”? When it comes down to basics, law is what any dominant authority actually deems to be law. Putting it crudely, if a yob wielding a screwdriver accosts you in an alleyway demanding possession of your wallet, he is effectively defining the law, albeit an extremely localised and fleeting version of it, and failure to comply, a “crime” punishable in the obvious manner.

Naturally the law undergoes a process of considerable tarting up as it rises through the scale until at national level, recorded in masses of leather-bound volumes, endorsed by an array of pompous blokes in wigs, ermine, mitres and crowns, and further supported by a compliant media, the whole idea of law and crime, or rather, statutory crime, can be readily presented to the population at large as somehow legitimate, permanent and operating in everyone's best interests.

Since the dawn of civilisation humans have lived in a variety of types of society – slave, feudal and, of course, currently capitalist. These societies have however had one thing in common; they have all featured minority ownership of the prevailing wealth of that society. Naturally, they have also featured minority control, via the law and the machinery of government. Needless to say, our metaphorical yob, suitably tooled-up, is lurking constantly in the background to concentrate the mind of the non-owning majority on compliance.

Legalised robbery

In modern capitalist society, ownership of the land, factories, transport, etc. is concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority, the capitalist class, comprising around 5 percent of the population. In essence this minority employs the other 95 percent, the working class, to produce wealth and otherwise run society in its entirety. By paying them a monetary wage which represents only part of the wealth they produce, and creaming off the surplus for themselves, the capitalists maintain a privileged lifestyle whilst the working class endures varying degrees of poverty, both relative and absolute.

You may think that this situation is a bit unfair. But scrutinise the statute books until you're blue in the face and you'll find that it's all perfectly legal. But try, if you dare, to redress the balance a little; pinch a few paperclips or whatever from your workplace or life a couple of designer garments from a boutique, and you'll have those selfsame statute books flung in your face. Shock, horror, you will have committed a crime.

So there we have it. On the one hand, the everyday ongoing, but legal theft perpetrated by the capitalist class on the working class, and statutory crime, which likewise is the everyday ongoing reaction from the working class to try to claw back some of its losses; to make up its wages, so to speak. Unfortunately at present there is no class consciousness informing this, and the victims will all too frequently be fellow members of the working class.

Numerically speaking, big heists such as the Great Train Robbery and the Millennium Dome Diamond Raid are rare. In reality, petty larceny is very much the norm.

According to crime figures, around 95 percent of all statutory crime is property-related. This breaks down very roughly as follows: 25 percent theft from or of motor vehicles, 25 percent burglary, 30 percent other forms of theft – fraud, forgery, shoplifting etc., and 15 percent criminal damage to property. The remaining five percent comprises four percent violence against the person and one percent sexual offences.

The capitalist class in Britain numbers around 3 million people, only a small proportion of whom are in the public eye. Via the media, we peasants are entreated to revere and adulate our titled aristocracy and royalty for the fine example they set us, and to respect and emulate the new-wealth, self-made brigade – the “entrepreneurs”, the “innovators”, the “wealth-creators”, the “providers of jobs”.

What incredible effrontery. What appalling self-congratulatory arrogance. These philanthropists are after one thing and one thing only – a fast buck. Bear this in mind at all times.

Aside from all this, the overwhelming bulk of the capitalist class are unsung and anonymous. They are the inheritors of old wealth; the descendants of medieval merchants, New World traders, eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial capitalists, etc. – the swindlers, slave-dealers and tyrants of a bygone age. They may well, for the most part, be perfectly decent people; they can hardly, after all, be condemned for the particular environment into whey they happen to have been born. One thing however, is certain. If they, along with the other members of their class, collectively disappeared tomorrow from the fact of the Earth, the buses would still run, the factories and farms still produce, the hospitals still function. All as normal. These people are non-productive, surplus to requirement, useless. They are economic parasites.

The capitalist system is legalised theft; real crime, through and through. The working class is employed solely to facilitate the profit process. Where profits cannot be realised because of the prevailing phase of the economic cycle, workers are thrown on the scrap heap, goods stockpiled, food destroyed, houses left unbuilt and land uncultivated. As a result, we have massive and ongoing worldwide deprivation, starvation, disease, premature death.

Again, when rival groupings of capitalists find themselves in conflict over colonies or raw materials, the working class is mustered to resolve the situation. Murdering or being murdered in your country's cause is perfectly lawful. Unleash a missile or bomb on some defenceless city slaughtering countless thousands of innocents and you'll have a nice shiny medal pinned on your chest. Kill one person, back on Civvy Street, in a momentary act of anger or desperation and they'll lock you up for life.

Ninety-five percent of statutory crime, as already indicated, is property-related. The great bulk of the residual five percent (violence against the person and sexual, offences), can be attributed to the everyday stresses and alienations that are part and parcel of our existence in capitalist society. We are conditioned into seeing our fellow workers, with whom, economically, we have everything in common, as rivals; as competitors for jobs and houses.

Where those fellow workers also happen to possess characteristics that proclaim the greater diversity of our species, be it skin pigmentation, accent, age, gender, sexual proclivity, disability; whatever then they are all the more readily identifiable as potential targets for abuse or violence. The real enemy, capitalism itself, sits unchallenged, safely clear of the firing line.

Social behaviour

The system is almost entirely responsible for statutory crime. In socialist society, common ownership and production solely for use would prevail. There would be no legalised theft; there could not be legalised theft. Likewise, almost all statutory crime would fade away. Theft would not exist. What would there be to steal? Your own property?

People will, naturally, retain their capacity to discuss, disagree and quarrel. Likewise, romantic creatures that we are, situations will periodically arise where two persons desire the same person or partner; the Eternal Triangle as it's rather prosaically known. Consequently, tempers may flare; fists (and handbags) may be brandished. Inevitably therefore, there will be occasional, recourse to acts of violence and accordingly there will, be a need for procedures to restrain the protagonists and address the causes.

Others, too, will suffer from mental illness, brain damage, simply draw an unlucky ticket in the genetic lottery and behave, not criminally, but non-socially.

So within socialist society there will, we suggest, be regulation of sorts and maybe even places of detention. But will the inmates find themselves banged up and slopping out? Surely not. We would think that their very inability to participate appropriately in society would be sufficient reason to extend to them the finest care, compassion and support that we can muster.

Henri Charrière's book Papillon is a very moving true-life account of life in the penal colonies of French Guyana. During one of his several escapes Charrière lived with a Venezuelan Indian tribe, the Goajira, and he recounted with great warmth, their uncomplicated communistic lifestyle, describing how they lived with a commonality of purpose, without money, without judges, without laws. The barbaric punishments meted out by “civilised” Europeans to their miscreant fellows would have been totally beyond their comprehension.

We suggest that it will be pretty much like this in socialist society. Although it will be global as opposed to tribal, people will still live in small localised communities and, freed from capitalism's physical and mental shackles, will spontaneously look out for one another. It is after all our nature to do so. What need will there be for a mass of laws to oversee this process?

Capitalism's politicians are a contemptible and shameless bunch; none more so than our current messenger-boy-in-chief, Tony Blair. Nevertheless, we are indebted to the dear chap for providing the grand finale for this article. During the last general election, he chuntered endlessly on about being “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”.

Socialists would readily endorse these sentiments but would take things just a little bit further than his own wishy-washy, and by no means original, list of measures. If you really want to be “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”, the solution is very simple – abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

Andrew Armitage

Tomorrow's Enemies (2003)

From the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the emergence of a recognisably modern Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 international relations have been based on the political sovereignty of states in which war became the politically-motivated use of force by generally recognised authorities. Wars between dynastic states became wars between nation states. Wars of state formation and consolidation were replaced by wars of unification and of imperial conquest.

In an era of European global expansion built on the technological and military superiority of industrial capitalism, clashes also occurred between Europeans and the indigenous populations they conquered. For more than two hundred years wars between expanding European states were motivated by economic necessity driven by the need for access to markets, exploitable populations, and sources of raw materials. The growth of European (or “Western”) influence was carried out with a sense of civilising mission and justified with ideas of racial superiority.

The carnage of the First World War called the whole project into question. For the next ninety years the existence of state systems and their international relations were debated largely in terms of ideology. They were interpreted as titanic struggles firstly “against fascism” while the Soviet Union built its own brand of state capitalism, and in the post-World War II period “against communism”. The European withdrawals from direct rule over former colonial territory in the face of indigenous nationalist movements after 1945 were interpreted ideologically as wars of “national liberation”.The centrally planned economy version of capitalism eventually succumbed to its more efficient liberal free-market variety. The implosion of the Soviet Union was greeted with joy among the NATO allies and we were promised a golden age in which to spend the “peace dividend.” Spending on armaments by the major powers actually declined. However the euphoria was soon dissipated and the world was confronted with wars of disintegrating states, and continuing wars in the not quite and the not yet states.

It has become increasingly difficult for politicians and others to explain these conflicts as having anything to do with high ideals such as defending democracy. Increasingly the more perceptive observers and commentators are labelling the “small wars” of Africa and Asia as “wars of oil and diamonds”, and those of Latin America as “drug wars” characterising them as piratical acts carried out in states incapable of enforcing the rule of a centralised authority. Even so-called “peaceful” Europe had its own backyard war in the Balkans as tensions previously held in check by Cold War priorities erupted into bloody armed conflict.

End of History?

Two influential interpretations of what is happening in the post-post-cold war world have appeared since 1989. They attempt to set the boundaries within which political debate takes place and try to avoid political questions some might find upsetting regarding the true nature of present-day society.

Commenting in 1989 on the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama, a policy planner in the US State Department, identified a feeling abroad “that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” He characterised this as “the Triumph of the West”, a situation in which economic and political liberalism having first seen off Absolutism and Fascism had finally seen the end of Marxism-Leninism. The Soviet Union was disintegrating and this demonstrated “The total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” It was, he said, “the end of history as such” (Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History?' The National Interest. Summer 1989 pages 3 - 18).

Oh sure, stuff would still actually happen but what had been reached was the endpoint in mankind's ideological evolution. The ideals of the French and American Revolutions had triumphed, their theoretical truth “is absolute and cannot be improved on.” The failure of “Marxism” he said was in large part a “failure to understand that the roots of economic behaviour lie in the realm of consciousness and culture.” Consciousness he said “is cause and not effect” and went on to argue for the “autonomous power” of ideas. For Fukuyama it is ideas and not interests which drive historic change, which seems to imply that we have had capitalism simply because some thought it a good idea.

Further he argued that “the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West” and that the roots of present inequalities are not to be found in the legal and social structures of society which are fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributive. The problem is not the form of society as “with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up.” These groups are themselves a legacy from the pre-modern period. This, it will be noted, is a classic piece of blame the victim excuse-making which makes the poor responsible for their poverty. It is a popular view in some circles as it fits in well with the prevailing capitalist apologetics. It represents the triumph of individualism over collective action.

And where the West had led the world would follow. Fukuyama pointed to post-1945 Japan's transition from fascism and government intervention to being a political and economic beacon of light fostering free enterprise economic liberalism in Asia, and in particular to China. He could identify no serious challenges from e.g. nationalism or religious fundamentalism, Western consumerism and the human need to be valued as an individual were too powerful to be resisted anywhere for long. True, the Third World was still mired in history and will in his view be “a terrain of conflict for many years to come.” In addition the Soviet Union was not likely to join the developed nations of the West as open societies “at any time in the foreseeable future.”

This was of course written prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall but reading it now one is reminded of the Astronomer Royal who said in 1957 that manned space flight was “impossible”, and we wonder if the State Department now thinks they were getting their money's worth.

The problem with this approach is that it is mistaken as to what constitutes history and historical agency, as to what that brings about major historical change. For Fukuyama it is economic and scientific developments and their culmination in the fulfilling of an abstract idea of “human freedom”.

Absent from his account is the collective political action by human beings in pursuit of their interests. By his account human actors on the stage of history are expected to accept their allotted roles. The contradiction between production which is collective and ownership which is private is ignored. The consequent class domination and exploitation seem not to enter the picture. And what happens when capitalism continues to fail to meet real human needs? For all its prodigious productive capacity capitalism only produces what can be sold at a profit leaving the many hundreds, if not thousands of millions in varying degrees of poverty and insecurity. Surrounded by a plethora of consumer goods many in “the West” appear to suffer what the American poet Randal Jarell called “A sad heart in the Supermarket.”

Clash of civilisations?

With the supposed “death of ideology” and the emergence of a post-modern world a new rationale for arms spending and a new bogeyman had to be found. One was not long in coming. A heavyweight journal, read mainly by academics and policy makers, published an article outlining the thoughts Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington on the matter. ('The Clash of Civilisations?' Foreign Affairs Summer 1993).

The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the emergence of a multi-polar world dominated by the USA as the only superpower was not in his view the end of history but rather it heralded a return to traditional rivalries. The divisions of the post-cold war world will, he said, be cultural ones between civilisations. He identified eight or so based mainly on religious systems of thought. Clashes between nations will be replaced by clashes between nations and groups of different civilisations. Civilisations have as their most important determining characteristic not history, language, tradition or culture but religion. Except for micro-level clashes over the control of adjacent territory the clashes of civilisations will not be concerned with the protection and promotion of vital interests so much as with the advancement of particular political and religious values.

But even here he is inconsistent. Among “civilisations” are four non-religious classifications: “Western” (by which he seems to mean Northwest European Protestant, and possibly Catholic, and their North American and Old Commonwealth descendants) “Latin American” (also mainly Christian but with an admixture of African and indigenous peoples), “Japanese” and “possibly African”. Another oddity is his hiving off of one group of Christians, the “Slavic-Orthodox” (possibly because they are for him not “real” Christians, and possibly because of their “ethnic” roots they are not “really” Europeans either?). On the other hand he seems willing to lump together all of those of the Islamic faith Arabs, Africans, and Indonesians alike while ignoring the important divide between Sunnis and Shiites. And he ignores the major clashes both between and within Islamic states (Iraq against Iran as an example of the first and the breakaway of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh an example of the second).

Civilisations have, he says, existed for far longer than nation states as organising principles. As economic modernisation and social change erode long-standing local identities, civilisations are left as the largest possible identifying principle. They will replace ideologies such as liberalism, free enterprise, fascism, communism etc. as belief systems around which alliances can be formed and enemies identified and demonised. Conflicts will in future occur “along the cultural fault lines” separating the world's eight or so civilisations from one another and will become the dominant form of conflicts in the world with the ever present danger of escalation to a global level.

Huntington's analysis does not of course explain the many wars started within his proposed “civilisations” – those of Christian Europe or Confucian China for example – nor those regions where different civilisations co-exist relatively amicably for long periods.

For those of us too dim to see exactly where he is going, he identifies Islam as the new (old) enemy as a continuation of the “centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam [which] is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.” Ignoring the British conquest of part of South Asia (partly Muslim and partly Hindu), its occupation with France of areas of the Middle East and North Africa (almost entirely Muslim in faith), and the Dutch empire in Indonesia (also largely Muslim), Huntington has the gall to warn his readers that “Islam has bloody borders.”

He gives as an example the war in the Balkans which followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. This area occupied the supposed “fault line” between the (Christian) Habsburg Empire and the (Muslim and Orthodox) Ottoman Empire. (Remember that for Huntington the Greek Orthodox is not “really” Christian.) But while the wars of Yugoslav succession were fought between and by people who happened to identify themselves as Orthodox or Catholic or Muslim or “Communist”, that is not why Yugoslavia broke up. This conflict had powerful economic motives and arose over the division of incomes and revenues between provinces having differing degrees of economic development.

Historically the proclaimed identities of the Balkan contestants were worked out by academics and intellectuals and in the main imposed on the populations by nationalists. These identities were subsequently manipulated by political elites when it suited their agendas. Bosnia fell victim to a land grab by two other Yugoslav provinces which prompted the intervention by NATO forces to “restore peace”. Turkey, a member of NATO, and the only one with a common border with the former Soviet Union against whom NATO was formed, while nominally a secular state, has a population the majority of whom identify themselves as Muslim.

What then is Huntington's agenda?

Huntington puts forward what he calls his “plausible hypothesis” warning that the economic and military strength of the “non-western” civilisations will increase relative to that of “the West”. This new situation “will require the West to maintain the economic and military power necessary to protect its interests in relation to these civilisations” [emphasis added]. It will not go unnoticed that this thesis fits perfectly with the need to re-demonise the populations of the Middle East for example as Arab, Iranian, Islamic and “other”. What it does is provide a “respectable” theoretical justification for the continuation of the warfare state that can be repeated ad nauseum in the popular media.

Huntingdon's thesis can be shown to be flawed on a number of other grounds, the chief of which is that for at least the past two centuries the modern world has been organised around the exploitation of wage labour. No matter what the political, religious, or ideological label reads the principal economic drive has been the production of wealth for sale on the market in the hope of profit. Capitalism is now by far the dominant mode of wealth production throughout the globe. It is the needs of capitalist economies that drive a state's foreign policy as its relations with other capitalist states.

Conflict over access to and control of vital resources by competing nations have for the past one hundred years been rendered respectable by the cloak of capitalist ideology. They are no longer capable of being so masked. And as Margaret Thatcher observed, the end of the Cold War and the subsequent reduction of the threat of nuclear conflagration between the two super-powers has made the world much safer for conventional warfare as a tool of international relations.

Gwynn Thomas

No logic (2003)

Book Review from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fences and Windows. By Naomi Klein. Flamingo, 2002.

The protests in Seattle, London, Genoa and many other places between 1999 and 2001 gave rise not just to labels such as J18 but also to a widespread movement known variously as anti-corporate, anti-globalisation and even anti-capitalist. Naomi Klein's book No Logo came to be seen as a manifesto for this movement, and Klein herself as a spokesperson for it, despite her protestations to the contrary on both counts. No Logo (on which see the Socialist Standard for December 2000 and August 2001) chronicled the rise of massive global companies such as Nike and McDonalds, and of resistance to them. Klein's latest book is explicitly not a follow-up to her earlier work, though inevitably it deals with similar issues.

Fences and Windows consists of a selection of Klein's journalism and speeches, mainly from 2000 and 2001, and this is both its strength and its weakness. It gains immediacy from having been written in the midst or the aftermath of demos, protests and large-scale discussions, but lacks any overall theme or coherence. Nevertheless, a number of topics that it deals with can be singled out. The fences of the title are the (literal and metaphorical) barriers that prevent people from protesting, from using various resources and from gaining access to education and so on. And the windows are the various kinds of opposition, from mass efforts at direct democracy to landless Brazilian farmers cutting down fences around unused land.

A chapter written in Prague is interesting for what it reveals of the views of many young Czechs. They see both capitalism and “communism” (read: state capitalism) as centralising power in the hands of a few and of treating people as less than fully human. The issue is not whether the state or multinationals are in power, but of how power is distributed. As argued in other pieces, poor countries are required to follow the economic rules laid down by the rich – who then disregard them themselves when they see fit. Post 9/11, even Canada has been forced by the US to toughen security at its borders, and give up a great deal of control over them to US security officials.

The power-holders have of course not just sat idly by while the protesters make their protests. As a way to avoid the objectors, they have moved some of their meetings to virtually inaccessible places. More worryingly, protest and dissent have themselves been criminalised, with police violence becoming more or less the norm, with prominent resisters being arrested on trumped-up charges and so kept out of the way during demonstrations, and with all civil disobedience being equated with violence. (This has become worse since the invasion of Iraq, especially in the US, with any protest regarded as helping “the nation's enemies”.)

The final section of the book turns to positive proposals. A chapter entitled “Limits of Political Parties” attacks the New Democratic Party, Canada's nearest equivalent of the Labour Party (Klein is herself Canadian, and this piece originally appeared in a Toronto newspaper). Klein notes that the most socially excluded parts of Canada's population support “an idea entirely absent from the mainstream left: a deep distrust of the state”. While the NDP advocates strong interventionist central government, a true left-wing party should “articulate a different vision, one founded on local democracy and sustainable economic development”. The last chapter proposes a merger of two forces, international anti-globalisation activists and community-based organizations.

But there is still no real picture of a society to replace capitalism, or of what the real implications of local democracy and sustainability might be. These cannot be valued or implemented in a world divided along the lines of class and nation, where profit is the priority. A thoroughgoing change to a world without classes, nations, governments or profit is needed. Sadly, Klein and the rest of the anti-globalisation movement, despite the sincerity and effectiveness of much of their critique of capitalism, have taken the first steps but have yet to see through to the genuine alternative.

Paul Bennett