Many serious commentators believe that the real death toll could be double that again, putting the bloodshed in the same kind of slaughter premier league as Iraq.

Wrong. Entirely wrong, insists Omar al Bashir, the dictator who took over the country in a 1989 military coup against its elected government.

‘The figure of 200,000 dead is false and the number of dead is not even 9,000,’ al Bashir told journalists in a video conference on Monday. And you know who is to blame for even that trifling level of killing:

‘You cannot at all rule out the Israeli role in any problem that any Arab country is facing because the security of Israel is based on weakening Arab states.

‘This is a camouflage for what is happening in Iraq, in Palestine, in Afghanistan.’

Yes, Israel is guilty of serious crimes in international law, not least its illegal occupation of Palestine. But Bashir's remarks constitute classic crackpot anti-semitism of the old school.

The left has - historically speaking - long had reservations about the deployment of United Nations forces in sovereign states, however unsavory the regime. But in the world after Rwanda, sometimes there is no alternative solution.

Like most journalists at this time of year, I have knocked out a couple of ‘my predictions for this year’ pieces for the paying punters. Here is an edited version of one such feature, centred on world affairs.

I promise to leave this post up for at least 12 months, so I can be judged on how accurate the forecasts turn out. Any readers keen to offer their take on such questions will find the comments box open.

In the US, Bush is already a classic second term lame duck president. After the Republicans lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate last year, all domestic legislation is now subject to bipartisan compromise.

He faces major economic constraints, too. There is little doubt that the US economy will slow down in the year ahead. The only question is just how deep the recession is going to be.

But Bush does maintain a relatively freer hand in foreign policy, with Iran, North Korea and the global war on terror likely at the top of his stated agenda.

Opec are trying hard to keep the price of that famous barrel of oil that no-one has ever sold on George Galloway’s behalf at or around $60, and may well succeed.

However, political risk analysts point to an increased risk of terorist incidents hitting energy infrastructure targets in the Gulf and expect continued violence in the Niger Delta. That could mean unexpectedly higher prices. If so, expect civil unrest in oil-dependent countries.

In the Middle East, the Israeli government remains unpopular after last year’s excursion into Lebanon, and further cross-border attacks seem unlikely. But if Abbas pushes ahead with plans for a technocratic government in Palestine, there will be scope for more violence in the Gaza Strip, and possible a suicide bombing campaign in Israel itself.

In Africa, expect greater rebel activity in both Chad and the Central African Republic. Although elections in Kenya have traditionally been associated with civil disturbances, this year’s contest is expected to pass of relatively quietly.

In Asia, the US will seek a naval blockade against North Korea, although Russia and China presumably won’t play ball.

Meanwhile, China could see an outbreak of good old fashioned class struggle, particularly in the coastal provinces, where there is growing discontent about working conditions, low wages and widening income disparities.

While the Sri Lankan army has gained ground against the Tamil Tigers, its chances of full military victory seem as elusive as ever. Various armed groups in Turkey – the PKK and offshoots, as well as the Kurdish Freedom Falcons – appear to be gaining in effectiveness, and are reportedly considering strikes on tourist targets.

Insurgents in Afghanistan remain well-funded thanks to narcotics sales, and will increasingly prove themselves able to take on Nato forces. Nor is the situation in Iraq likely to ameliorate in 2007. The limitations of US military might in such situations is surely readily apparent.

Rising nationalist sentiment will limit the efforts of governments in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary to push through neoliberal reforms.

There is the possibility of military skirmishes in Georgia, sparked by Russian support for the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Kyrgyzstan – riven by factions lining up for and against the president – may prove another flashpoint.

Continued electoral support for nationalist right wing parties in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands may lead to racially-motivated civil unrest, predominantly in the form of white attacks on black targets.

Many eyes on the left will continue to focus on Latin America. Chavez has the money to consolidate oil industry nationalisation and move on to other sectors. Morales in Bolivia hasn’t. It is difficult to see how he can make good promises to his electoral base, other than by expropriation of foreign capital. Whatever the rhetoric, that isn’t likely to change rapidly.

Friedrich Wilhelm Siegel is demanding $100m because his rights to due process, his honour and his ‘physical, psychic and moral integrity’ have been violated:

’In his suit, Siegel - who years ago asked the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice to order the Central Bank of Venezuela to stop issuance of paper money and implement use of electronic money - claims that since 1984 he has been submitting his proposals to different Venezuelan administrations.

‘He alleges, however, that President Chávez’s government actions such as electronic tax collection, social comptrollership and even the Bank of the South are some of the proposals Siegel has been making over the last years, while with a different name. Therefore, he is demanding acknowledgement of his authorship.’

If anyone can be said to hold the copyright for socialist ideas, the descendents of another German economist certainly spring to mind. But given that Chávez recently declared himself a Trotskyist, perhaps the Fourth International should be asking for some money as well?

Le Monde reports an opinion poll on how supporters of unsuccessful candidates for the French presidency intend to vote in the second round.

It’s looking good for Sarkozy, it has to be said. He’ll mop up 83% of Le Pen’s backing, and 54% of Bayrou’s. That should just about do the job.

But here’s an interesting fact. Some 17% of Besancenot’s voters - and 22% of Laguiller’s – are going for Sarko in preference to Ségo. No explanations are offered.

The late Robin Cook used to argue that the problem with Turkey is that the politicians are accountable to the military, not the military accountable to the politicians.

Marxists would go one further, and point out that in all capitalist states, the ‘bodies of armed men’ are the ultimate guarantors of the ruling classes’s interests. It’s just that in Turkey, the problem tends to come to the surface rather more frequently than in most other countries.

With the latest round of political instability – centred on opposition on the part of secularists to soft Islamist Abdullah Gul assuming the largely ceremonial presidency – we can see these tendencies at work once more.

It is sometimes difficult for the democratic left to find its bearings in situations such as this. Yes of course we are secularists by sympathy. But a military coup against what is the functional equivalent of west European Christian Democrat becoming head of state will be a setback for all who want to see Turkey develop along democratic lines.

Whichever side prevails in this contest, the repressive policies of the Turkish state – from frequent torture of political prisoners to the clandestine war in Kurdistan – will continue unchanged.

Our solidarity should be reserved for the Turkish left. Whatever its Stalinist deformations, many of its activists are deeply entrenched in the Turkish working class, the only force that can bring about the kind of social change the country desperately needs.

Meanwhile, if Gul is entitled to the job under the rules set down by the Turkish constitution, we should argue that he be allowed to undertake it.

Ireland’s Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has called a general election for May 24. The contest will be the most open for some time.

On the level of returning a government, voters basically get the choice between re-electing Ahern’s populist Fianna Fail and its centre-right coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, or opting instead for Labour and the rightwing Fine Gael, which have put together a joint platform.

However, gains are expected for both the Greens and Sinn Fein. Indeed, the latter are polling around 10%.

The attention of the left will be focused on the Socialist Party, affiliated to the Committee for a Workers’ International. Its existing parliamentarian, Joe Higgins, is likely to be returned.

What’s more, he could be joined in the Dail by a second Socialist Party TD in the shape of Clare Daly, a shop steward at Aer Lingus.

Daly topped the poll in the Swords ward at the last local elections and is standing in the constituency of Dublin North where she took 12.5% of the vote in 2002.

Observations from Irish readers especially welcome in the comments box.

Sarkozy it is, then. But if he is remotely serious about introducing Thatcherism a la francaise, he'll have to take on the most militant and politicised working class in the developed world. And as the early reports make clear, the kids from the banlieues already look ready to rock 'n' roll.

The next few years on the other side of the Channel could make 1980s Britain look like a poster decade for social partnership. That's all for now. I'm just off to dust down my copy of Teach Yourself French.

All sections of the French left seem are calling for immediate mobilisations against the Sarko government, according to Le Monde. Well, all sections of the French left except for Lutte ouvrière, which doesn’t seem to regard the new administration as much of a problem.

Olivier Besancenot of the LCR argues that with the election of Sarkozy, ‘it is the programme of Medef [the French employers’ organisation] that is ingrained in power’.

He adds: ‘It is to the construction of social and democratic resistance that the LCR intends to dedicate all its forces from now on. It will take all initiatives in this direction in the coming days.’

The Communist Party’s Marie-George Buffet argues: ‘Our social system has already been badly damaged by years of neoliberal policies. Our democratic rights are in danger.

‘It is necessary to assemble to block the politics that the right is going to set in motion. I make an urgent call for the mobilisation of all the forces of the left to organise a ripost.’

José Bové – the preferred candidate of the SWP in Britain – wants ‘resistance in the face of a regime that promises to be authoritarian, and solidarity with all those who risk suffering in the coming months measures of discrimination and exclusion’. Even the Greens profess themselves up for ‘the battles’.

But LO’s Arlette Laguiller isn’t getting worked up on this one. She observes casually: ‘The world of work should not lower its head, because this election isn’t a catastrophe.’

In a way, I hope her contrarian view is justified, and that the French working class aren’t about to be subjected to the full neoliberal monty.

Maybe Sarkozy will play for time in the first instance, as he assesses the balance of class forces. That’s what Thatcher did for the first few years in office. But I suspect she is utterly, utterly wrong.

The message is that Sarko - pictured - means business and, yes, there is plenty of argy-bargy in the offing:

There is a real risk of social unrest, as France's new president tries to deliver on his promise of "rupture" with the past.

The biggest powder kegs in France are the run-down, immigrant housing estates that ring Paris and other large cities. It was these estates that experienced three consecutive weeks of rioting in 2005 - and Mr Sarkozy is deeply unpopular among some residents after infamously describing rioters as "scum"…

Interesting, Rachman argues that the social crisis in France today – from the point of view of the bourgeoisie – is not as pervasive as it was in the Britain of the late seventies/early eighties.

There hasn’t been the experience of the International Monetary Fund bail out, and while there have been plenty of strikes, industrial militancy is not on the scale seen in the Winter of Discontent.

Then comes what I found to be the most striking paragraph in the entire piece:

The second major difference between the Thatcher and Sarkozy programmes is that the new French president has promised to get cracking in his first 100 days in office. By contrast, Lady Thatcher moved quite cautiously. It was only after her second electoral victory - and the huge boost gained after winning the Falklands war - that she embarked on her biggest battle with the unions and the miners.

In other words, whichever way this is going to pan out, we are going to find out sooner rather than later.

The incident, during which Osanloo suffered an injured shoulder, occurred at the Seven-Tir metro station in Tehran. The men failed to present a warrant for his arrest; they were acting under orders from Colonel Zamani, a commanding officer of the security forces, it has been claimed. Osanloo resisted arrest, while passers-by and union colleagues, including Yaghoub Salimi, a union board member, helped to free him from the attackers. Salimi was later arrested, but was released shortly afterwards.

Another member of the union, Gholamreza Gholamhosseini, is also awaiting the verdict on charges of "propaganda against the establishment". He was arrested on 3 December last year and released on bail six days later.

That democratic socialists should implacably oppose any US aggression against Iran – by either conventional or nuclear means – goes without saying. But our solidarity should be with the Iranian labour movement and the left, and not the theocracy.

The SWP-dominated Campaign Iran raises no criticisms whatsoever of the Islamic republic, and I’m not aware of it even talking about the extensive working class struggles against the government’s neoliberal politics.

Far better work is being undertaken by the Hands Off the People of Iran group, initiated by the CPGB/Weekly Worker and well-known Iranian leftist in exile Yassamine Mather. Check out its website here:

Thinking of including Venezuela in your emerging markets portfolio? After all, the Caracas IBC index was one of the best performers the developing world last year, with a 156% rise in local currency terms. Well, think twice:

Venezuela’s stock market lost almost a third of its value yesterday after two of its largest, most liquid stocks were delisted, causing concern that the exchange would fall into insignificance.

"I can’t help seeing Venezuela reversing into a Bolivian bourse kind of situation, where stocks are non-existent and bonds take all the traded money," said Mark Turner, an equity analyst at Hallgarten, an independent research house based in New York.’

Bad news for the Socialist Party in the Irish elections. Its sole TD, Joe Higgins, lost his seat in Dublin West. And his comrade Clare Daly failed to make the cut by the narrowest margin imaginable:

Socialist candidate Clare Daly has been eliminated from the Dublin North constituency by just two votes following a nine-hour recount.

A request this evening by Daly's election team for a further recount has been refused on the ground that she was not present for the first recount and so could not challenge its validity.

Nor did the anticipated breakthrough for Sinn Fein materialise. The party lost one of its five seats.

Meanwhile, Bertie Ahern did better than expected, and could be close to an overall majority. But his coalition partners, the Progressive Democrats, underwent electoral collapse. The likelihood is that its two remaining TDs will collapse back into Fianna Fail.

Coming after the wipeout of both the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity in the Scottish elections, and the far left’s loss of ground in the French presidential contest, the Irish results underline just how hostile the climate is for revolutionary socialism right now.

This morning, Le Monde reports on the pressing financial situation of the Parti Communiste Francais - logo top left - in the wake of its ill-fated decision to run Marie-George Buffet for the presidency, at a cost of 5.5m euros.

To make matters worse, the number of PCF deputies is likely to be halved in forthcoming legislative elections, which will entail further loss of state financial support.

Party treasurer Jean-Louis Frostin told the comrades: "Our coffers are tight. Whatever the result in the legislatives, we will have to decide collectively between now and the end of June the appropriate measures to put our administration on a durable equilibrium."

There is talk that 55 administrations jobs at headquarters will have to go. It’s all reminiscent of the situation at the Scottish Socialist Party, which is making all employees redundant after getting wiped out in last month’s Holyrood contest. There are even rumours of the forced sale of the PCF’s substantial Paris headquarters.

However, the day might just be saved by flogging off a number of works by famous artists in PCF ownership, including a Fernand Léger fresco, a charcoal portrait by Picasso, and a picture by Marcel Duchamp that is currently on display in the Centre Georges Pompidou. The pictures have already been valued by a prominent curator.

It is a telling commentary on the state of the left across Europe that what was once one of the continent’s strongest ostensibly Marxist parties is reduced to selling such treasures.

It looks like Tony Blair has got a new job sorted for himself once he steps down as prime minister next week. George Bush has asked him to become the Quartet’s special envoy to the Middle East, and the indications are that Blair will take up the offer.

If you want an instant mission statement, the job boils down to sorting out the Israel/Palestine question. Without that, nothing else in the region can progress.

Blair is hardly the best conceivable appointment. His decision to join the invasion of Iraq will ensure that he will not be perceived in the eyes of most Arabs as an honest broker. Surely a harmless superannuated Scandinavian social democrat should have been chosen instead.

Nevertheless, the gig has gone to the Pretty Straight Guy. So what sort of facts should he be taking into account when trying to develop a workable policy towards the most intractable issue in international relations today?

The beginning of wisdom is surely to realise that Israel’s continuing and expanding colonisation of Palestinian land is illegal, immoral, self-defeating for Israel and incendiary for the Middle East.

Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong, but hardly surprising. Whatever writers such as Berman maintain, it’s not ‘pathologicial’ either. For every Israeli killed, Israel kills 3.4 Palestinians, most of them innocent bystanders. The ratio is even higher when it comes to children - 5.7 to one.

There is also no getting round the fact that Hamas won the last election, and that Fatah is utterly discredited, after achieving levels of corruption previously unseen in the history of national liberation movements.

Yet even though Arafat and his cronies divvied up most of the aid money between the corrupt political elite, his political successors are still clearly the Quartet’s preferred partner.

Why should recognition of a Hamas-led administration be made contingent on its formal recognition of Israel? Britain and other countries have longstanding diplomatic ties with many Arab regimes that do not recognise Israel.

Finally, there has to be a recognition that real peace requires an admission by Israel of the historic wrongs it has perpetrated to Palestine, and massive compensation for the dispossession, pauperisation, marginalisation and savage oppression wrought on Palestinians for more than five decades.

Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not made Israel any more secure. Killing or marginalising a generation of Palestinian leaders has only served to empower the Jihadist gunmen on the streets.

Was Douglas Alexander’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations a mild coded criticism of the US foreign policy under George W Bush? However much Gordon Brown insists it wasn’t, the answer is quite clearly yes.

And it is inconceivable that the Secretary for International Development, a Brown protégé, would make such sensitive comments – in Washington itself, too – without the explicit authorisation of the boss.

This is hardly the end of Atlanticism as we know it, of course. But it does look like some kind of subtle repositioning.

Post-war prime ministers have clung to the ‘special relationship’ as some sort of comfort blanket to compensate for Britain’s imperial and economic decline. British governments – both Labour and Tory – have been close to US governments, both Republican and Democrat.

The high watermark came with the Thatcher-Reagan and Clinton-Blair friendships, and the reductio ad absurdum with Bush and Blair congratulating each other on using the same brand of toothpaste.

So important has the SR become that Blair famously agreed with one interviewer five years ago that Britain should even be ready to ‘pay the blood price’ to keep it going. And that blank cheque is always signed in the blood of ordinary servicemen and servicewomen, of course.

Far from being a partnership of equals, the special relationship hardly qualifies as a partnership at all. The US is usually happy to have Britain along for the ride, so long as the UK does what it is told.

But – with the arguable exception of the Falklands – there is not a single case where the US has supported the Britain when it has not been in their interests to do so.

Essentially, twenty-first century Britain has the strategic choice between becoming an adjunct of the USA or struggling to maintain its standing as the third most important economy in the EU.

Whatever Brown may wish, it no longer has the political weight to conduct a meaningful independent foreign policy. As nobody seems to think a reorientation towards Brussels is on the cards, Alexander’s speech remains a gesture at best, and a limited one at that.

At certain stages in the 1990s, many informed commentators canvassed the prospect of Russia returning to dictatorship. And they weren’t talking about a reversion to Stalinism, either.

The usual model advanced was late seventies Chile without the sunshine: an authoritarian government, perhaps headed up by a military strongman, overseeing an ultra free market economy.

What we got in the end was Chile Lite, in the form of a so-called managed democracy, under the aegis of a man sometimes punningly dubbed ‘Putinochet’.

Russia today hardly has the look of a prosperous liberal democracy in the making about it. But it probably isn’t going to become a fascist dictatorship or a geopolitical aggressor, either.

The country has even been allotted a role in the globalised economy, namely that of an energy powerhouse - the world’s second-largest producer of oil after Saudi Arabia, and the biggest exporter of natural gas.

British companies participating in the goldrush, most notably the two UK oil majors, have been somewhat arbitrarily treated by the Russian authorities of late. But they are still up for a share of the spoils.

Not only does the west need Russian oil and gas, it also badly needs to keep the Kremlin onside politically. As a re-emerging great power, its acquiescence is a prerequisite both for the independence of Kosovo and some sort of settlement to the tensions over Iran.

Nevertheless, if Andrei Lugovoi does indeed have a case to answer over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, London has every right to demand his extradition, and to apply political pressure to bring that extradition about.

Hence the expulsion of four Russian diplomats from Britain earlier this week, and Moscow’s tit-for-tat reciprocation today. So far, so seventies spy novel.

But following this gesture – and that is pretty much all it is - it’s not clear how much more room for manoeuvre foreign secretary David Miliband has left to him. A government that can find excuses for complicity in the corruption of the House of Saud for the benefit of BAE is unlikely suddenly to be overcome with scruples if that is going to hurt BP and Shell.

It is interesting that Xinhua doesn’t give this “new social class” a name. But let’s call it what it very clearly is: a bourgeoisie.

What’s more, this bourgeoisie is organically linked to the ruling Communist Party of China. Indeed, the Organisation Department of the CPC Central Committee recently revealed that, as of the end of last year, more than 2.86 million party members worked in privately-owned enterprises. Some 810,000 ran their own businesses.

Today the China Daily website offers readers these reflections from one such woman. Wei Jianhua embodies the contradictions at the heart of today’s China:

Although Wei has been running her businesses for more than a decade, she is still reluctant to be called a "private owner". She says it makes her feel as if she oppresses workers.

"My heart was moved when I heard the news," Wei recalled. "I immediately felt my life was fulfilled."

Some people are very easily pleased.

A mere six years rarely provides sufficient distance from which to assess the impact of major historical events. But it already seems clear that 9/11 has done as much to shape our world as any other event in most of our lifetimes, save perhaps for the collapse of communism.

In a sense, the two developments have resulted in reciprocal interaction. There has been a switch in the long-term organising principle of US politics: the War on Terror has replaced the Cold War in determining the priorities for the sole superpower, both domestic and foreign.

The result has been a growth in military action abroad and ever-increasing curtailments of civil liberties at home, with London following where Washington has led. The socialist left necessarily has to oppose such tendencies, and build the broadest opposition to both.

Furthermore, our commitment to the elementary democratic principle of the right to national self-determination aligns us with those seeking just settlements for legitimate grievances across the Muslim world. The list of those is long indeed, and includes Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Kosovo and the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq.

Yet at the same time – and this is where a wide swath of the far left loses the plot - we need to be clear that terrorism does need to be beaten.

This will not happen by military means, as the Iraq debacle underlines. If that were possible, the battle would already have been won.

Instead, we should urge international collaborative efforts in policing, intelligence gathering and persuasion. Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed, fresh atrocities prevented, erstwhile bombers convinced to embrace democratic politics.

But it will not achieve this by tail-ending terrorism, or by regarding al Qa’eda as somehow allies of convenience in an imagined common anti-imperialist struggle. The darkly dystopic political vision that animates them is as much opposed to everything we stand for as anything on offer from the White House.

Our position, then, can sharply be summarized as ‘neither Washington nor mosque’. Why that should be such a difficult concept for the vast majority of the left to grasp is almost beyond me.

But the Communist Party polled 8.2% and got 22 MPs, while the Coalition of the Radical Left picked up 5.0% and 14 seats.

The Coalition includes Diethnistiki Ergatiki Aristera (Internationalist Workers' Left) a 2001 split from the International Socialist Tendency led by the British SWP. It is friendly with the International Socialist Organization in the US. Anybody know if any DEA people made it into parliament? That's their paper on the left, by the way.

Trade union opposition to pension reform and widespread anger over the incompetent way the centre-right government of Costas Karamanlis handled the recent forest fires were some of the factors at work.

Yet despite the left winning the backing of a collective 51.3% of the electorate, Karamanlis's outfit New Democracy picked up a two-seat lead, enabling him to form his second administration.

The other bad news is that far right has parliamentary representation for the first time since the collapse of military rule in 1974.

UPDATE: The key point here is that Greek experience confirms the lessons of France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Holland, Scotland, and perhaps Wales and Sweden.

The far left's only hope of having any real influence on national politics in western European nations is to constitute itself as the revolutionary pole of attractions inside a genuinely democratic and pluralist socialist formation.

Not too hard a concept to grasp, is it? The pity is, it seems utterly beyond the comprehension of the two contending London-based cliques that lead British Trotskyism. Lead it down a dead end, that is.

In the USA, Democrat presidential contender John Edwards has been on a United Auto Workers picket line in Detroit. Every Democrat runner is backing the dispute, That's him pictured left, glad-handing AFL-CIO trade union activists in Seattle.

As the Financial Times argues in a feature today:

In between hobnobbing with billionaires and raising record-breaking amounts of campaign finance, the 2008 Democratic hopefuls are rolling up their proverbial sleeves and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with America's blue-collar classes.

Of the three leading candidates, Mr Edwards, who is trailing in third place, is the most populist. But the millionaire trial lawyer's anti-corporatist rhetoric has dragged both Hillary Clinton, who leads in the polls, and Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, to the left.

On the same page, it notes that all the top Republican hopefuls are united around 'small government' ideas, and hints at a growing polarisation in US society. Not having been on the other side of the pond for three years, I would welcome comments from US readers and more recent visitors.

The very terms 'right' and 'left' are used very differently in Europe and North America, of course. But if anything, the Democrats now appear to stand formally to the left of New Labour.

That raises a small problem for those British Marxists who continue to argue that New Labour is a 'bourgeois workers' party' and therefore call for a 'class vote for Labour', while at the same time insisting that the Democrats - to whom many US unions extend financial backing - are a straightforward bosses' party that no socialist can back.

It is yet another symptom of the changing politics of our times that these two stances are logically inconsistent. A vote for the one is surely just as defensible as a vote for the other. Or just as indefensible, if you prefer.

Meanwhile, on another page, the FT notes that in Germany, Franz Müntefering - the Social Democrat vice-chancellor in Angela Merkel's Christian Democrat-led coalition government - is facing a serious rebellion from a faction around Kurt Beck, which is seeking to scrap unpopular labour market reforms introduced the last time the SPD were in office. Maybe the threat of losing support to Die Linke has something to do with all this..

In both cases, bourgeois politicians seem plainly canny enough to realise that their parties are in danger of suffering a disconnect from their traditional base.

Even though they are motivated by populism rather than by class politics, they are right to do so. Brown should be careful not to underestimate 'these people', also known as the labour movement that created the Labour Party. Workers and their families do have votes.

[Pic credit: AFL-CIO Now Blog]

Yet even on that basis, Blair’s attempt to draw an analogy between today and the ‘rising fascism’ of the 1920s and 1930s is no more than self-serving, politically illiterate, histrionic attempt to soften up public opinion for any future military strike on the Middle East’s premier pariah.

Fascism, as I have remarked before, is the most widely-misused term in the entire political lexicon. Everybody from the state of Israel to health and safety reps are routinely branded the Nazis de nos jours. But not every run-of-the-mill military dictatorship or two-bob theocracy makes the cut.

In Dictatorland, only the real Big Swinging Dicks get to be fascists, properly so called. Your Pinochets and your Milosevics are second-raters, schoolboys that dreamt of being a strikers for Manchester United but ended up in the Northampton Town back four. Sure, they made it as professional footballers; it’s just that they are in a different league.

As a bare minimum, fascist regimes must – as a matter of definition - be totalitarian. Iran cannot properly be so described. The simple fact that independent working class organisations openly exist, for instance, is of itself almost enough to make the point. The picture above shows this year's May Day demonstration. It is clearly an occasion marked with more gusto than in London.

Brave union leaders such as Mansour Osanloo are the direct target of state and employer repression. But that happens in many times and places, from the USA in the hey-day of the Pinkerton Detectives to contemporary Guatemala, without rendering those countries fascist.

Similarly, there is some political space in Iran. Constricted and limited political space, but political space nevertheless. Elections take place, with voters offered the choice between full-strength shia theocracy and shia theocracy lite. These are genuinely opposed political factions, which routinely knock seven shades out of each other by means of bitter polemics in the Iranian press.

For the avoidance of doubt, neither of these points confers one iota of legitimacy on the dictatorship. I merely make them for the sake of clarification. The government of Iran deserves the odium of every democrat on the planet. But to call it ‘fascist’ strips the term of any descriptive value; it is almost as stupid as branding women activists ‘feminazis’.

What about Blair’s accusation that Iran supplies weapons to insurgents in other countries? This is undisputedly true. But again, that’s not enough to qualify Iran as fascist. Consider one incident that is well within Blair’s political lifetime.

In the mid-1980s, the executive branch of the Reagan administration armed the rightwing Contra rebels in Nicaragua, despite that being prohibited by domestic legislation. To get round the law, it financed the exercise from the proceeds of arms sales to the Iranian government, which has not undergone any qualitative changes in the last two decades. If it is fascist now, it was fascist then.

Lastly, there is the question of the Iranian nuclear programme. The issue of which countries have ‘the right’ to possess the bomb is too extended to be had out in this post, although my short answer is ‘none’.

But at this stage, Iran has done nothing that is forbidden under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Clearly, military action against a country for sticking to what it is clearly permitted to do under international law would be something of a first, even by Dubya's standards.

Let's conclude by going back to the idea of the idea of ‘nasty scores’ for dictatorships. Easily the most abhorrent regime in the Middle East – and perhaps the entire world – has to be Saudi Arabia. The private fiefdom of the House of Saud – exports: crude oil, wahhabism, and very little else - is an obvious Perfect Ten.

Yet less than a year ago, our brave neo-Churchillian Cassandra scuppered the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE Systems kickbacks to the Saudi state, paid in return for massive arms contracts.

Before Blair brands anybody else as Chamberlains redux for appeasing Middle East dictatorships, he should mull the morality of that action.

UPDATE: A number of other blogs have responded to this post with some points of their own. Read thoughtful contributions from Paulie here, from John Angliss here, and from Jim Denham here.

Like almost all commentators these days, I strictly observe the distinction between Islam the religion and Islamism as a set of political ideas. But helpful as such differentiation is, it is still insufficient.

That’s why I have recently made an unwanted debut on Islamaphobia Watch, with Martin Sullivan offering the following comment on an earlier post on this blog:

Outlining his proposals for combating the threat of further terrorist attacks, Osler writes that "Islamist networks can and must be infiltrated and smashed" – which would mean infiltrating and smashing Hizb ut-Tahrir, presumably. Since when did socialists support the right of the state to infiltrate and smash legal and non-violent political organisations? In fact, on the generally accepted definition of "Islamism" as a politicised version of the faith, organisations like the British Muslim Initiative would also fall victim to Osler's "anti-terrorism" strategy.

I can see how my phraseology was open to that interpretation, but clearly this isn’t what I meant to say. My intention was to argue that it is legitimate for the state to infiltrate and smash Islamist cells planning terrorist attacks.

Radical Islamist parties - including Hizb ut Tahrir and al Mujahiroun - should remain legal organisations. In a liberal pluralist society, that is not a cost of freedom; that is the nature of freedom. I hope that makes things clearer.

The problem is that ‘Islamism’ as a catch-all term takes in political formations of a sweeping range of orientations. No one word can possible properly cover such a range of thought.

Turkey’s AK Party is widely considered to be either functional equivalent to a west European-style Christian democrat outfit, or at least on the way to becoming so.

Iran in the 1970s threw up currents that considered themselves both Muslims and Marxist-Leninists. Whether or not one thinks such a synthesis possible, the attempt to bring it about is not more illegitimate than Latin American liberation theology.

So help me out, readers, and stop me being branded a racist again. What terminology should be adopted more correctly to describe the heterogeneity of contemporary Islamism?

In the nineteenth century, the country became the focus of what Arthur Connolly called ‘the Great Game’ between the Russia and Britain for dominance in Central Asia.

More recently, the USSR first sponsored a puppet government and then, in 1979, invaded Afghanistan to prop it up. In response, the west threw arms at jihadists both domestic and external throughout the 1980s. The unsurprising end result is that the Taliban and Al Qa’eda ended up running the show.

After 9/11, the US - which had effectively put them in power in the first place - could no longer allow that situation to obtain. The result was the Operation Enduring Freedom invasion of 2001 and a second puppet government, this time aligned with Washington rather than Moscow.

Fighting with the Taliban continues, and Lord Ashdown - former United Nations High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina - is in no doubt about the outcome. The Taliban is going to win, and the results could be world-historic:

"I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite [Shia], Sunni regional war on a grand scale.

"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this [failure] to match this magnitude."

That’s consciously Palmerstonian language, of course. The nations of Asia are not ‘ours’ to win or lose in the first place. I did not support the invasion. I cannot see how the continued presence of foreigmilitary n forces will resolve Afghanistan's manifold contradictions; it can only exacerbate them.

But within his own frame of reference, Ashdown is probably right. The situation has full potential to proceed from the disaster it is now to whatever infernal degree comes next on the scale of catastrophy.

Sadly there is no hope of a progressive outcome from this mess. In a country that is chronologically in the twenty-first century rather than in any real sense of the twenty-first century, the working class is tiny and without any social weight.

Arguments from the likes of Workers’ Power - a small British orthodox Trotskyist outfit - that 'the working class organisations could create a militia, if they only had the will' would ring of black humour and deliberate satire, if it was not for the certainty that these people never write in anything but deadly earnest.

I suppose there is a purely formal sense in which the soon to be victorious Taliban could be described as a 'national liberation movement'. They lead a military fightback against armies of occupation.

It's just that nobody in the right minds would expect what is perhaps the most obscurantist trend within the entire camp of reactionary political Islamism to deliver much by way of liberation.

Sections of the ultra-left will doubtless cheer them on. They will chatter excitedly about the ‘bloody nose’ the Taliban's triumph will supposedly dish out to imperialism, and disregard the executions of homosexuals and the Afghan women who get acid thrown in their faces for the temerity of trying to offer girls an education that will come about as a result.

The Marxist left loves nothing more than to come up with 'the correct line' on everything, everywhere in the world. It's in our political DNA. But just sometimes it is as well to admit that we do not have a preferred option. Afghanistan is a case in point. We don't know for sure what will happen; but we do know it will be bad.

Five years ago I spent several weeks on a journalistic assignment in Saudi Arabia. The vile nature of the theocratic dictatorship was readily apparent. With King Abdullah currently on a state visit to Britain, I’m reproducing an article I wrote on country for the leftwing newspaper Workers’ Liberty.

Let me just add that acting Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable – an oil industry economist by trade – deserves credit for his decision to boycott ceremonial events surrounding the visit.

George Orwell himself probably could not have thought up a name as archetypically Orwellian as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. But that is the name the police go by in Saudi Arabia, and their control of public space is almost total. Riyadh is what the fictional 1984 looks like in the actual 2002.

Punishment for the slightest criticism of the system is harsh. Torture, amputations and executions are routine. There are no political parties, no elections, no independent judiciary, and no independent human rights organisations. Welcome to a country described by Tony Blair as "a good and dependable friend to the civilised world".

It is a good and dependable friend to the US in particular, which has based around 20,000 troops their since 1991. Saudi Arabia deserves the description of imperialist client state every bit as much as Israel. And it is no secret why the west sponsors this particular client. It is home to 25% of proven world oil reserves.

But how should socialists understand Saudi politics? It is probably more useful to consider Saudi Arabia as a capitalist dictatorship that exploits religion to secure legitimation rather than a genuine theocracy. True, the monarchy justifies its rule by King Fahd's formal title of "custodian of the two holy mosques".

But for the royal family and its hangers-on - a milieu saturated with Johnny Walker Black and imported prostitutes - the pretence of Islamic conviction is a mere flag of convenience. If devout they be at all, their devotion is to the oil wealth that has made them the contemporary personification of Mammon.

Muslim radicals see the House of Saud in the same light as Trotskyists regarded the ruling class in the former USSR, misruling in the name of their highest ideals. They would consider it, so to speak, a "degenerate Islamic state". And on some accounts, the country may now be close to Islamic "political revolution".

Leading commentators have argued that such is the distaste for the decadent ruling elite, a single inflammatory speech from a radical cleric is all it would take to bring the regime's collapse. In the homeland of Osama bin Laden and almost all of the September 11 hi-jackers, that could come at any time, without the slightest warning. What would emerge would truly be an ideologically-driven Islamic fundamentalist state, with incalculable consequences across the Middle East.

Earlier this year I spent several weeks on a journalistic assignment in Saudi Arabia, visiting Jeddah, Riyadh and the oil-dominated Eastern Province, a virtual state within a state controlled by Saudi Aramco.

The first challenge was getting in at all. Visa applications from journalists are routinely refused, so I was forced to lie about my occupation. The next difficulty came in even arranging interviews. I wasn't looking for controversy, but rather for information on the oil and tanker shipping sectors, with a view to the sort of routine analysis that fills the pages of the western business press.

But such is the fear of even accidentally falling foul of the state that several people halted appointments after a few minutes, once it became clear that I was a reporter. Others spoke only on condition of anonymity. Nor was the local media much of a source of information. The English language press reported little beyond the latest Israeli atrocities in Palestine and the speeches of prominent mosque leaders, while many internet destinations were blocked.

There was no question of getting out and talking to ordinary people. Although there isn't a curfew, there might as well be. No public entertainment is available whatsoever. Saudi Arabia is one of only two countries in the world that forbids cinemas. Western films circulate legally in video format, although strict censorship sees even kissing scenes scissored out. With public consumption of alcohol strictly prohibited, there are no bars. The few coffee shops are inhabited exclusively by men, and closed by evening.

The position of women remains worse than the position of blacks under apartheid. In South Africa, blacks could at least wear what they liked, drive cars and trucks, or eat in black sections of restaurants without white accompaniment. In Saudi Arabia, the veil is strictly enforced, while women are denied driving licenses and can only eat out if accompanied by a male family member, in specially segregated 'family sections' of restaurants.

Saudi Arabia's social structure is unique. The royal family is absolutely parasitic on the country's oil wealth, which enables it sustain a bloated state bureaucracy that - until around a decade ago - was able to guarantee employment to all Saudi men . Most productive work is undertaken by the 5 million or more non-nationals in a population of 23 million.

A relatively small layer of mainly European or middle class Indian expatriates dominate professional and managerial jobs. Most Britons I spoke to were earning around the same as they would in a similar job at home. But because salaries are tax free, and accommodation on one of the so-called "compounds" for westerners part of the package, in real terms they were about twice as well off.

Many were younger people intending to work five or ten years and save what they could. Others were typically older men seeking a new start after collapsed marriages. Ex-pat life is made more bearable by compound parties thrown almost every night of the week, fuelled by home-brewed hooch and casual sex, and largely tolerated by the authorities. Such behaviour is probably more a reflection of their alienation than the desire for a good time.

There are in addition millions of immigrant workers - Filipinos, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis - doing the manual jobs, working the waterfront, driving the taxis and cleaning the hotel rooms. They are again there for the money, and most will freely tell you that they hate the place.

Until the immediate past, the native Saudi proletariat was almost non-existent. But with mass unemployment in recent years - perhaps reaching 20%, although the government sits on the statistics - there has been a policy known as "saudisation". Private companies are faced with the requirement to fill an increasing proportion of jobs with Saudi nationals each year.

In a bid to diversify away from oil, the state has also sought industrialisation, constructing purpose-built cities such as Jubail, with its huge petrochemical plants. For the first time, there is now a layer of Saudis in blue collar work.

But as far as anyone is aware, there are not even the first stirrings of trade unionism, let alone socialist organisation. Normally one of the first things I do when visiting a country on assignment is to seek out local leftists and arrange face-to-face discussions. But Saudi Arabia is one of the few large countries in the world to lack a known socialist current of any description, even in exile.

Yet there is said to be massive discontent just below the surface. While normal methods of socialist agitation are almost impossible, one possibility of revolutionary contagion did occur to me. Most guest workers earn enough to make annual visits to the families left behind in their countries of origin. Pakistan and the Philippines have both seen growth of Trotskyist trends in recent years. But the likelihood must be that Islamic fundamentalism will fill any vacuum long before socialists ever could. What attitude should we take to insurrection, if and when it comes?

"Left" and "right" are meaningless adjectives applied to official politics in Saudi Arabia. Of course we have no truck with the monstrous regime in Riyadh. But to argue that socialists therefore should back clerical uprising as somehow an "objectively anti-imperialist" progressive alternative to the existing government fails to convince me at all. Tragically, that is a mistake which much of the British left - unable to grasp the ideas of Third Camp politics - could shortly make.

Two New Labour cabinet ministers have been wrong-footed after there turned out to be 300,000 more foreign nationals working in the UK than official figures had earlier suggested. The total is 1.1m, and not the 800,000 previously reported.

Officially, home secretary Jacqui Smith and Peter Hain, her counterpart at the Department of Work and Pensions, are simply waxing apologetic because of the statistical cock-up. And of course, if we are going to have official statistics at all, they should be reliable statistics.

But the reality is that there is a backstory at work here, and that backstory is the increasing level of soft focus racism in official British political discourse.

With most immigrants now white rather than black, the tone is thankfully not as crude as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet is no less unmistakable for all that.

The most obvious example is the quasi-BNP sloganeering qualities of recent speeches from the New Labour top brass.

David Cameron has taken that as the green light to commence a coquettish flirtation with what is still a hot button issue for the Tory faithful. Let the Financial Times supply the context:

The Conservative leader's first big speech on immigration marks a shift in the political battle over the issue. Mr Cameron has been wary of echoing his predecessors' calls for quotas on migrants, for fear of reviving voter perceptions of the Tories as the "nasty party".

But Tory strategists believe that Gordon Brown's patriotic rhetoric as prime minister - such as his call for "British jobs for British workers" - has opened a window for the opposition party to debate the issue without appearing racist.

As ever, there is a class dimension in all this. Brown didn’t demand British boardroom posts for British senior managers, or call for employment at City investment banks to be restricted to UK national investment bankers. The rich have an unquestioned right to residence in this Other Eden.

Millionaires are allowed automatic entry into Britain, whatever their passport. Indeed, many of them are given tax breaks to encourage them to base themselves here.

New Labour’s forthcoming immigration points system – and an immigration points system is supported in principle by the Respect party’s only MP – welcome 25-year-old computer nerds and 30-year-old entrepreneurs.

But there is a lot of dirty work to do in Britain. Those who want to do it should be allowed to live here legally and not be criminalized for their willingness to get their hands dirty. Even if they are Romanians.

Politicians should have the courage of their neoliberal convictions. Either liberalisation maximises economic welfare or it doesn’t. If it does, governments should dismantle immigration controls with the same conviction with which they once scrapped capital controls.

Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.

The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.

Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.

In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway - will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.

This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left. Criticism of the state of Israel does not automatically align the critic with the ‘wipe the Zionist entity off the map/until victory! until Jerusalem!’ tendency.

It doesn’t take a crypto-irridentist to observe that the state of Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians is contrary to most widely accepted definitions of human rights, to international law, and to the principle of self-determination.

While touting itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel has purposefully excluded hundreds of thousands of Arab victims of ethnic cleansing for more than half a century. These actions weaken its political and moral standing, and by implication, the political and moral standing of its friends and supporters.

For every Israeli killed, Israel kills 3.4 Palestinians, many of them innocent bystanders. The ratio is even higher when it comes to children, where it runs to almost six to one. Pointing this out does not transform a writer into a vicarious Arab nationalist.

Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not made Israel any more secure. In the final analysis, the killing and marginalization of generations of Palestinian Arabs has work only to prop up the corruption of Fatah and, more recently, generate the backlash that has won mass popular support for the reactionary fundamentalists of Hamas.

The only potential winner from a two-state solution is perhaps a layer of the nascent Palestinian Fatah crony bourgeoisie. In the fourth world refugee camps – some of which I saw on a trip to Jordan – nothing will change. Hamas will be gifted the opportunity to establish an Islamist theocracy governed by sharia, contiguous to Israel itself.

Ultimately, the only stable long-term solution is a democratic secular state, with full religious and political freedoms for all inhabitants, a notion that has respectable grounding in progressive Zionist thought.

As Hannah Arendt argued: ‘The real goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland. This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state.’ Whatever else Arendt got wrong in political theory, on this much she is completely correct.

This is important to both the South African and international left, not because of who or what Zuma is, but because of the social forces on the back of which he has risen to political prominence.

By all accounts, this man is not a particularly pleasant person. He has been acquitted of the rape of an HIV positive woman half his age, who apparently regarded him as a father figure, while (probably well-founded) corruption charges against him are on hold.

His record in the anti-apartheid struggle - which includes ten years on Robben Island - vouches for a degree of political courage, at least in the past. But what is decisive is what he stands for now.

Zuma’s platform, such as he has one, is based on amorphous left populism. He has detected the breadth and depth of the disillusionment with the South African Blairism of Thabo Mbeki, and positioned himself to take advantage of it.

Yet even as he drops hints to his support base that he will redistribute wealth in favour of the black poor, he has let it be known to South African business that their vital interests will not be challenged. His speeches travel notably light on concrete commitments.

Even so, Zuma has effectively been forced to reflect a changed mood in the townships. It’s been a long time coming. When the ANC took office in 1994, Many Marxists expected rapid radicalisation, as its pro-capitalist policies failed to deliver meaningful improvements to living standards.

Instead, the black majority cut what they regarded as ‘their’ party an awful lot of slack. The newfound enthusiasm for Zuma indicates that they now want to speed up the pace of change.

In the popular imagination, he represents an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet once in office, the likelihood is that Zuma will disappoint the people who put him there. He might talk the Chavez talk, but without the oil money, he is hardly in a position to walk the Chavez walk.

The South African Communist Party risks sustaining collateral damage by their strong support for him, although there is reportedly a dissenting minority.

The task for the thinking left is to keep its political bearings in the next period, neither demeaning itself by cheerleading the president-in-waiting or cutting itself off from the evident frustrations that lie behind the surge in his support.

But as I argued a couple of days ago, there are serious question marks over the man. Let’s leave aside the recent acquittal on rape charges and the corruption accusations he still faces. It ultimately comes down to a question of politics.

For a start, it is already clear that a Zuma presidency would represent no challenge to capital. Consider, for instance, this direct quote to an audience of potential investors in Los Angeles recently:

"Some have said that if Zuma is in charge of the administration, it will move left because of his support from the trade unions, which is very left, and those from SA Communist Party and therefore that the economic policies of the government will change.

"I had thought this was not a big issue, but I am grateful that I have opportunity to explain and would love to tell you brothers and sisters that nothing is going to change."

Mind you, some sensible-sounding people combine Zuma scepticism with a slightly more upbeat take on the situation. Since my earlier post, I’ve had email correspondence with a democratic leftist with firsthand experience of South African politics and trade union organisation.

As his observations will obviously be worth more than anything I can write from London, let me quote some of his analysis at length. First, there were some positives about the conference process, he insists:

The campaign was rotten, with threats and vote bribery playing a big role, mainly with Mbeki loyalists trying to sway Zuma-aligned delegates coming out of provincial meetings that showed a Zuma lead. It is a victory for the ANC as an organisation that it can come through this, have a clean vote and ‘regime change’, and then have the rivals embrace and shake hands in front of the delegates.

The role of deputy president of the ANC went to Kgalema Motlanthe, a former leader of the Mineworkers’ union and until today ANC secretary general, who has received high marks for fairness, honesty, and organisation building. That is good for the ANC, for the movement, and for the country in general …

He agrees that Zuma has not been upfront about his intentions if elected, but argues:

That is not entirely the result of his political slipperiness. Zuma has always maintained that it would be inappropriate for an ANC candidate to campaign in contradiction to standing ANC policy …

One key will be who is elected to the national executive committee. The Zuma slate, if elected, could usher in a more pro-labour, pro-social investment, AIDS-rational, Mugabe-pressuring ANC political platform. This will not necessarily affect government, however, until there is another national election.

The other big question mark is liberation movement culture. Will Zuma unite the movement and reach out to social partners, or will he replay and deepen the ugly, conspiratorial politics of Mbekiism? Will he keep up his gross populism around women, gays, and the death penalty? We don't know.

Finally, he adds that a split in the ANC is not excluded:

I think this outcome makes a split in the ANC less likely, at least for now. If Mbeki had won, it would have looked very bad. Zuma came out of the round of pre-conference provincial meetings with the lead, so an Mbeki triumph would have looked like vote buying had won the day.

One out of four ANC members lives in the Eastern Cape province, the ethnic home of Mbeki’s (and Mandela’s) Xhosa ethnic group. If nasty internal politics continue, the worst case scenario is still possible: instead of breaking along economic or ideological lines, the ANC could divide over ethnicity. That is the way to the end of democracy and a really ugly future.

Thanks for this useful information. Other informed contributions welcome, particularly from South African comrades.

[Picture shows Mbeki, left, and Zuma, right]

But they believe that the regime of Pervez Musharraf - the military dictator praised by Tony Blair for his 'courage and his leadership in taking Pakistan on this journey of change and modernisation' - will hold on to power, at least for now.

Nevertheless, clearly a question mark remains over the very viability of the country. In a state where political, economic and military power is in the hands of a Sunni Muslim Punjabi elite that ruthlessly suppresses Baluchi and Pashtun insurgency, ethnic tension is always a given.

Whether under civilian or military governments, the Punjabis have never been able to accommodate regional dissent. Moreover, the military – supported by the US and Nato, and perhaps the only real embodiment of the unity of the Pakistani state – has always resisted decentralisation to the provincial level.

Additionally, Islamism also has to be factored in the equation. General Zia ul Haq, dictator in the 1970s, deliberately encouraged the emergence of Islamist groups, in order to undermine support for the secular parties that opposed him.

In the following decade, the US offered cash and training to Islamists in the region, in support of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan. These same people are now highly critical of Musharraf, given his backing for the US invasion of the neighbouring country.

Indeed, the US has only heightened the resentment by its conduct of military raids within Pakistan, aimed at killing Afghan insurgents holed up on the other side of the border.

Finally, Islamists in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir use the divided territory as a base for terror attacks elsewhere, most notably India. Musharraf has promised Delhi he will take appropriate action, but so far has not delivered on his words.

The US – and so, of course, Britain – has long courted the dictator as part of the Global War on Terror, pumping $10bn into the country since 9/11. But there have been recent signs of impatience on the part of Washington, which feels that he hasn’t been doing a particularly good job on its behalf.

Accordingly, it tried to broker a deal with Bhutto, on the grounds that she would act as a force for stability and moderation, and maybe even a return to democracy. And it is true that she headed a nominally social democratic party, affiliated like New Labour to the Socialist International.

But there are few good reasons to think that a coalition between a military strongman and a quintessentially bourgeois politician, widely accused of corruption, would have brought about much material progress for Pakistan’s poor.

In any case, as of today, the US project lies in ruins. That won’t come as good news for George W Bush; but the uncertainties that today’s events will generate mean that the rest of us have no cause for celebration either.

Not so long ago, Côte d'Ivoire played a similar role for the Francophone side of the continent. But nearly six years ago, that country fragmented along tribal lines almost overnight, in a manner that few had foreseen. The pieces have yet to be put back together again.

The best hope now must be that Kenya can avoid the Ivorian fate of civil war. Yet that currently arises as a genuine danger.

Like many African countries, the former British colony is an artificial polity, where ethnicity is by far the most potent marker of identity. People see themselves primarily as Kikuyu or Luo, Kamba or Kalenjin.

As I found out on a visit to Mombasa in 2002, the population of 37m is divided into 40 ethnic groups, none of which comes anywhere close even to a plurality.

Standard class-based analytical approaches are necessarily difficult to apply. True, there is a labour movement in Kenya. But like so much else there, it is warped by tribalism, and is seen as essentially based on the Luo.

The proximate cause of the current violence is the way in which incumbent president Mwai Kibaki, of the dominant Kikuyu grouping, openly rigged the recent elections to deny victory to Raila Odinga, a Luo.

It is tempting for Europeans to try to look at the situation through left-right spectacles. Odinga - who was educated in the old East Germany - has certainly flirted with Marxism in the past. Heck, he even christened his son Fidel Castro Odinga.

He can also turn on the radical rhetoric when he needs to. He has even advanced the slogan ‘roads! electricity! water!’, which has to be more or less a straight lift from ‘bread, peace and land’.

Kibaki is undoubtedly as corrupt as other African rulers, and stuffed the ballot boxes to ensure that wealth and power remained in Kikuyu hands.

A limited degree of moral support may be due to Odinga, on straightforward democratic grounds; he would clearly have won fair and square elections.

Yet he remains the millionaire businessman son of a millionaire businessman, with a project simply to advance his own tribe over Kibaki’s. That simply cannot be deemed progressive.

[Picture: Odinga supporters in the slums of Nairobi]

Populism has a long tradition in US politics, and in 2008 no exponent is more adept than former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. I mean, have you ever been to a political event in this country which culminates in the main speaker strapping on a bass guitar and inviting a local band on stage for a rousing rendition of Sweet Home Alabama?

As those old enough to remember the seventies anthem will recall, the track even includes the incendiary line ‘now Watergate does not bother me’. For a man seeking the presidential nomination for Trick Dicky’s party, the choice of song points to a certain degree of chutzpah.

Until now widely derided as a Bible-bashing good ol' boy no-hoper, the result of yesterday’s Iowa caucus considerably boosts his chances of an eventual shot at the top job, even though the smart money still has to be on Giuliani as the eventual Republican standard-bearer.

But what especially interested me was the way Huckabee clearly sought to mine the same vein of blue collar and middle-class anxiety as John Edwards of the Democrats. Campaign themes have notably included rising healthcare costs, widening income inequality, and the job losses that globalisation has bought in its train.

Here’s a Financial Times report of Huckabee on the stump, busily stressing the unspoken contrast between his background and that of his private equity billionaire rival Mitt Romney:

Huckabee described how he grew up in a home with no indoor toilet and with a father who dropped out of high school and worked two jobs to make ends meet.

“This country still belongs to people like us. I’m not asking you to elect me to the ruling class. You are the ruling class,” he said.

This land is your land? This is distorted class politics, hijacked by the populist but reactionary right; it is maybe even a set of sentiments that the US left could tap into. Yet the country remains as far away as ever from the construction of a sizeable workers’ party.

The problem for Huckabee – as the exit polls underline – is his heavy reliance on the evangelical Christian vote. That may have been enough to carry the day in Iowa. But it probably won’t do the trick in New Hampshire, and certainly not in New York or California.

Giuliani is consciously operating a ‘big state’ strategy. Pro-choice or not, he remains clear favourite to take on Hillary. Or, after yesterday, just possibly Obama.

In his own words, Fukuyama argues for 'a kind of Marxist interpretation of history that leads to a completely non-Marxist conclusion'. Basing himself on essentially the same (Hegel-derived) propositions as Marx did, he maintains that not communism but liberal democracy and free market capitalism represents the final form of human social organisation.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism, things certainly did seem to be heading in something like that direction. But - as Gideon Rachman points out in a recent article in the Financial Times - there is now clearly a cohesive alternative to the Fukuyama model. And it isn't one that the left should welcome, either.

Both Russia and China are developing authoritarian regimes that oversee dirigiste capitalisms. Without having thought out the question properly, it occurs to me that there does seem to be parallels in both cases with the corporatist model of Mussolini's Italy.

And I'm worried that this could prove an elephant trap for some sections of the left. For a start, there are plenty of nostalgics out there who are still well-disposed to any projects either Moscow or Beijing cares to undertake.

What's more, they are sure to point out that the alternative is untramelled neoliberalism. From there, it is an easy step to the conclusion that what Russia and China are doing is somehow historically progressive, even worthy of emulation in the developing world.

That just makes it even more important for the sane left not to lose its bearings.

They will also create something of a dilemma for Labour Party leader Ehud Barak. When he took up his job as defence minister in Olmert’s coalition government, Barak promised that Labour would withdraw following publication of the document.

If he keeps his word, the administration will fall; all available polling evidence points to a return to office for former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly hardline revisionist Zionist party Likud. Labour would face meltdown in the Knesset.

But breaking the promise would cost Barak and Labour dearly in terms of political credibility, and might only amount to delaying the inevitable.

Eliyahu Winograd’s interim conclusions – which went public eight months ago – openly attacked Olmert for severe failings over the attack on Lebanon; the final version is expected to be even tougher.

While the retired judge won’t explicitly demand Olmert’s ouster, his final verdict will more or less have that effect, possibly paving the way for somewhat distasteful foreign minister Tzipi Livni to take over PM.

If that wasn’t enough to be getting on with, Olmert also faces corruption allegations; his personal popularity rating is now 8%, and that represents an increase in recent weeks. It is hard to see how he can survive.

One card he has played to bolster his popularity is to stress his role in peace negotiations with the Palestinians in the wake Annapolis, which are intended to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. But even this might not be enough to save him.

The outline of a two-state deal been available since SCR 242; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after.

Yet it has proved no simple matter to implement, and there are grave doubts that a Bantustan solution is workable, in any case. That Gaza would, under that outcome, remain the giant prison camp it currently is has been strongly underlined by recent events.

Gaza - currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway – can have no meaningful sovereignty if Israel is able to cut off its supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.

Ultimately, the only stable long-term solution is a democratic secular state, with full religious and political freedoms for all inhabitants; but whatever the impact of Winograd, that is not something that any mainstream force in Israeli politics can bring itself to say right now.

Obviously, the answer to that question depends entirely on how one assesses the situation. Jendayi Frazer - US assistant secretary of state for African affairs – yesterday described what is going on as ‘clearly ethnic cleansing’, but was careful to add that she ‘does not consider it genocide’.

That evaluation seems to me – sitting here in London, with no special knowledge of the country beyond a visit on journalistic assignment a few years back - essentially incontestable.

Although there is a worrying tribal dimension to the killings, the scale of brutality does not seem commensurate with the portentous designation ‘genocide’, in the generally accepted sense of the word. This isn’t a re-run of the killing fields, at least not as things stand.

But saying that leaves open the issue of exactly where the threshold should be placed. Would 10,000 murders suffice? If not, 100,000? More still? Can we work on the basis of some hitherto unspecified percentage of a given ethnic group? Does 50% plus one count as genocide, but not 50% minus one?

It is impossible to answer that question, although one is reminded of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of hard-core pornography: 'I know it when I see it.’

Naturally, Ms Fraser chose her words extremely carefully; after all, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which theoretically imposes on the UN an obligation to prevent genocide. I say theoretically, because in six decades, it is arguable that the UN has not acted to stop a single instance of this most horrendous of crimes.

Some regional rulers are urging drastic action. Paul Kagame, president of neighbouring Rwanda, has openly called for a pre-emptive military takeover:

"It might not be fashionable and right for the armies to get involved in such a political situation. But in situations where institutions have lost control, I wouldn't mind such a solution," he said in an interview in Kigali with Reuters on the eve of an African Union summit in Addis Ababa.

That’s not an idea any democrat could find remotely desirable, of course. In any case, it is simply not a runner, as the Financial Times points out:

Kenya is one of only a handful of sub-Saharan African countries never to have experienced a military coup.

Kenyans familiar with the army say senior commanders have been reluctant to allow the deployment of troops for fear they could splinter along ethnic lines.

Kagame speaks, of course, as the head of a country where long extant tribal tensions spun out of control, setting off the chain of events that led to the massacre of 800,000 people in the madness of 1994. That stands as a warning of what could yet happen in Kenya.

Yet the solutions that socialists normally advocate seem just as inoperative as his demand for the army to step in. I don’t doubt that some far left websites will issue rousing calls for the Kenyan working class to seize state power; but in a country where organised labour is as divided on tribal lines as any other institution, even such abstract propaganda is liable to be misread in tribal terms.

All the international left can do is watch matters play out, in the hope that two sets of corrupt and business-oriented bourgeois politicians defuse the brutality before a bloody endgame is reached. It is hardly an encouraging prospect.

But Putin will not become ‘the outgoing president’ in the sense the term is used in the West; he still be very much in the picture as prime minister, and likely to act as a president in all but name.

Like many people with a background on the far left, I spent an inordinate number of man-hours studying the history and politics of what was Russia, then the USSR, and is now Russia again. It is salutary to reflect on what things have changed and what themes have remained constant.

For instance, it speaks much of Kremlin paranoia that the authorities went to considerable lengths to rig a poll that its favoured candidate would pretty certainly have been able to win fairly. There are direct parallels with the actions of rulers past.

More nostalgic sections of the left – ironically, perhaps, the very people who deride newly independent Kosovo as a ‘gangster state’ - may not be unsympathetic to the economic programme of Putinism.

They will regard the purchase of Sibneft, the seizure of Yukos, and the de facto expropriation of much of Royal Dutch-Shell's interest in the Sakahalin-II project as tantamount to renationalisation.

Sorry, comrades. Just because a government in the Kremlin is forcibly taking control of sections of both domestic and foreign capital does not mean it is 1917 all over again. These assets have not come into public ownership, but are instead under the sway of a small coterie centred on the Kremlin itself.

Authoritarian capitalist Russia has been hailed by Goldman Sachs as one of the so-called BRIC countries. The acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the world's most powerful merchant bank believes that this quartet will prove to be the economic superpowers of the twenty-first century.

Critics have argued Russia that Russia is largely a ‘resource play’, temporarily buoyed up by high commodity prices. That prognosis is starting to look ill-founded.

Russia’s allocated role in globalisation is that of energy powerhouse. It is the world’s second-largest producer of oil and the biggest exporter of natural gas. There are few scenarios that leave Russia’s ruling class short of either cash or international political clout in future.

Perhaps the most obvious parallel is with Saudi Arabia, a country run for the benefit of a clique, with a bunch of ex-KGB men taking on the role of the House of Saud.

Another mistake that political DNA renders much of the left liable to make is the illusion that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation – whose presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov came a distant second, with just under 18% - can somehow be considered progressive.

Forget the ritual invocations of Marxism-Leninism; this is a party whose predilections towards nationalism and patriotism unalterably give it a red-brown tinge.

The democratic left and the free trade unions remain miniscule and without influence. But as things stand, these are the only organisations in the country worthy of solidarity and support.

But state governors obviously can’t go kerb-crawling down whatever qualifies as the Big Apple equivalent of Shacklewell Lane; that’s presumably why they end up paying $5,000 an hour for the services of the women supplied by Emperors Club VIP.

Even in today’s expensive world, this is a hell of a lot of cash to hand over for a quick bunk up. At that price, clients might well feel entitled to expect some anonymity.

No such luck for Eliot Spitzer. He might not have been caught with his pants down. But he was caught making telephone calls to negotiate a state of affairs in which that was to be the reasonably expected outcome.

Now he is out of a job at which he was, by all accounts, rather good. The parallels with Eliot Ness – the guy who put Al Capone behind bars – are doubtless overblown. But Spitzer had made a lot of powerful enemies, after extracting billions of dollars in penalties from investment bankers engaged in illegal activities. Not for nothing was he dubbed ‘the Sheriff of Wall Street’.

It is difficult to see why his sexual proclivities should prevent him from continuing to bust overpaid Wall Street hucksters, many of whom are naturally overjoyed at his political demise.

Ultimately, whatever happened in Washington is fully covered by the ‘consenting adults in private’ clause. The left rightly argues that the state should butt out of the bedroom in matters such as homosexuality or sadomasochism; opinion is rather more divided on prostitution, but consistency dictates that we should not moralise about the uncoerced variants of sex for sale.

Some papers today are reproducing the nauseating ‘look at what a family man I am’ publicity pics - such as the one above - from his gubernatorial campaign, complete with the ever-lovin’ Silda and three cute kiddies in tow.

Straight out of the David Mellor playbook, for sure; but this infidelity is a matter that can only be resolved between Spitzer, the missus and ‘Kristen’. Whatever prurient glee or schadenfreude the media may derive from Mr Boy Scout’s untoward hanky-panky, it is none of the public’s business.

The governor of New York State is a smug git, I’ll grant. So smug that he even called a press conference to give an apology for something or other, without quite being able to bring himself to say what he was apologising about.

He did not say that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. Then again, he didn’t say that he did have sexual relations with that woman, either.

At least he didn’t decide to sue the newspapers that carried a true story, which might have led to him having to stand up in a courtroom and perjure himself; nor did he twist the arms of his political associates into making up stories to cover his tracks. Full marks on that score.

Of course, having set himself up as Mr Goodie Two Shoes, Spitzer presumably did not have much choice but to resign from office. Few British politicians would ever act like that; they wouldn’t have to.

Shtupping the secretary was no barrier to Paddy Ashdown becoming de facto ruler of Bosnia and now Afghanistan; a similar offence cost John Prescott little more than widespread ribaldry about cocktail sausages.

Steve ‘Shagger’ Norris and ‘Bonking’ Boris Johnson – hey, just what is it about Tory London mayor wannabes? – content themselves with knocking off political journos, councillors and local party activists.

In an era when it is possible to be president of France and still get off with a supermodel, just why do our leaders set their sights so low?

It’s almost tempting to conclude that the IFC came up with its cuddly choice of moniker on account of a wry sense of humour. Inevitably, the notion of ‘inclusive fundamentalism’ smacks of the same self-deprecation as branding a Northern Ireland assembly slate ‘Paisleyites for Ecumenicalism’ . Then again, I suspect those involved long ago underwent triple irony bypass surgery.

It is true that there will also be a nominally reformist ticket, Mosharekat, which is aligned with former president Mohammad Khatami. But in the Iranian usage, the adjective ‘reformist’ carries few of the connotations it bears when deployed by the socialist left.

Khatemi’s project is essentially to liberalise the Islamic Republic without undermining its theocratic basis, while re-establishing economic relations with the West in order to attract investment into the oil and gas sectors. It is devoid of progressive content.

That’s the problem with so-called managed democracies; too much management, too little democracy. Iran’s bureaucratised Islamist regime has bottled out of putting its waning popularity to any meaningful test, simply by banning its most coherent critics from standing.

And there are coherent critics aplenty. There is an active labour movement that continues to operate despite repression by the state, and indications of growing student radicalisation.

There are also submerged national questions; Iran is a multinational entity with a number of ethnic and religious groups discriminated against by the Persian Shi'ite majority.

The key statistic to watch is turnout. For the millions of poor Iranians hurt by rising inflation, abstention will rightly be regarded as a more practical stance than backing the Khatami platform.

Of course the left should campaign strongly against any US military action against Iran. But genuine solidarity will not be built by glossing over the reactionary nature of Iran's capitalist ruling class in the name of abstract anti-imperialism, as Respect MP George Galloway appeared to do yesterday when finding justification for Tehran’s execution of homosexuals.

For serious socialists, simultaneous opposition to imperialism and clerical reaction really shouldn’t prove that much harder than walking and chewing gum at the same time.

A quick trawl of the main British leftwing websites – well, the free access ones, at least - reveals not a single readily available pro-Mugabe article from the pen of any socialist. Nor am I aware of any Labour MP, of any persuasion, or even one single prominent trade unionist, backing for the Zimbabwean ruler.

Maybe one or two unimportant individuals or small groups have uttered praise for the Harare regime, under the illusion that his actions are somehow ‘anti-imperialist’.

Here’s some Canadian guy I’ve never heard of, arguing that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change is ‘a US and EU vehicle for strengthening a neo-colonial domination of Zimbabwe and of white farmers for stopping land reform’ and that some Zim NGOs are dupes of ‘the Trotskyites’. But read the piece and your nutter alarm should kick in automatically.

Meanwhile, further perusal of Glover’s article reveals that:

In 1994 he [Mugabe, pictured above] received an honorary knighthood from the Queen on the recommendation of the then Tory government.

And that:

In 1984, the Tory government sold him lots of Hawk fighter aeroplanes, which were later used in an illegal war in the Congo.

Hardly a convincing case for leftist complicity so far, is it, Stephen? To be fair, Glover goes on to point out that in 2000, Blair agreed to sell Zimbabwe spares for the Hawks that Thatcher sold it. That takes us straight into a debate about whether Blair can in any meaningful sense be described as part of ‘the left’; on that, I suspect we are going to have to differ.

The best that Glover can do to substantiate his stance is to quote a part sentence from Tony Benn’s diaries, in which Benn expresses delight at Mugabe’s 1980 election victory. That gives the Daily Mail website – not the print edition, interestingly – the excuse to publish a mugshot over the caption:

‘Shameful: Tony Benn, an icon of the Left, gleefully endorsed Mugabe despite his soldiers’ record of rape and torture.’

What Glover conveniently forgets is that Mugabe’s ascent to power came after the 1979 Lancaster House agreement, brokered by then-foreign secretary Lord Carrington on behalf of the Thatcher administration.

The quote from Benn is shamefully wrenched out of all historical context. As I remember the political climate of the day, there was cross-party consensus that a deal to end white minority rule in Rhodesia was both inevitable and a good thing.

Nor do I recollect any claims that the 1980 poll was anything other than approximately fair and square. What, any case, would Glover’s alternative have been? Continuation of the white supremacist government of Ian Smith was no option, even though some Tory rightwingers openly counselled keeping it alive.

Glover’s polemic - written to a pre-ordained conclusion the weight of which the analysis is patently unable to bear - frankly doesn't stack up. Yet it seems to be the best the right can do on perhaps the most pressing issue in world politics right now.

The Pope famously doesn’t have any divisions. But he does play well with Catholic swing voters in an election year. American Idol cameo notwithstanding, Gordon Brown clearly hasn’t attained the popular recognition factor his predecessor enjoyed on the other side of the Atlantic.

So where does that leave the special relationship? Post-war British governments – both Labour and Tory – have been close to post-war US governments, both Republican and Democrats.

Successive prime ministers have clung to the concept as some sort of comfort blanket that partially compensates for imperial and economic decline. The hope - as formulated by classically-educated Harold Macmillan - has been that Britain could somehow play the role of Greece to America’s Rome.

The high watermark came with the Thatcher-Reagan and Clinton-Blair friendships, and the reductio ad absurdum was surely the time when Bush and Blair congratulated each other on using the same brand of toothpaste.

Such was the import placed on keeping Washington sweet that Blair famously agreed with one interviewer some years ago that Britain should even be ready to ‘pay the blood price’ to keep the friendship going. And that blank cheque is always signed in the blood of ordinary servicemen and servicewomen, of course.

The irony is that, from being a partnership of equals, the special relationship hardly qualifies as a partnership at all. The US is usually happy to have Britain along for the ride, so long as the UK does what it is told.

But – with the arguable exception of the Falklands – there is not a single case where the US has backed Britain on any important issue when it has not been in their interests to do so. Sometime, as was the case during the Suez crisis, Washington has actively sort to undermine London’s plans.

Essentially, twenty-first century Britain has the strategic choice between acting as an adjunct of the USA or struggling to maintain its standing as the third most important economy in the EU while staying outside of the eurozone.

Whatever Brown or David Cameron may wish, it no longer has the means or the political weight to conduct a meaningfully independent foreign policy.

More than three decades later – at a time when well-publicised food riots are rocking Haiti, Bangladesh and Burkina Faso – it is still the case that huge numbers of people in the richest country in the world are not getting enough to eat.

Their situation is highlighted in the Financial Times [registration required] today, following reports that some chain stores are having to ration sales of the cheapest foodstuffs on account of demand from the poor:

The Congressional Budget Office forecast the number of Americans on food stamps would next year reach 28m, the highest number since the programme began more than 40 years ago.

The impact will be felt most acutely by the 35m Americans - 10.9 per cent of all households - who already struggle to put enough food on the table each year. About 11m of these are thought to have "very low food security", meaning someone in their home went hungry for lack of money to buy food, according to government data from 2006.

This state of affairs is the upshot of the neoliberalism practised by successive administrations – Republican and Democrat alike - since the Reagan era, which have seen the disparities between rich and poor reach their highest levels since 1929.

That was the era of Herbert Hoover, who famously campaigned on the slogan ‘a chicken in every pot’, before delivering a level of starvation thankfully never seen before or since.

What do the two Democrat contenders this time round have to say on the issue? Well, if this website is anything to go by, Clinton has a better paper position than Obama, and is pledging to end child hunger by 2012.

Good, in as far as it goes. But after the HillaryCare U-turn of 1993, it’s difficult to take her promises seriously. And presumably she will be happy enough leaving the adults to starve.

McGovern was right; widespread hunger does call into question the efficacy of the capitalist system. America deserves a political leadership that at least takes the issue seriously.

Voltaire insisted that any God who could permit such devastation could hardly be described as benevolent. Rousseau countered that the actions of humanity had contributed to the devastation; by erecting rickety buildings and forcing people to live in such close confinement, the death toll have been exacerbated greatly. Even atheists and secularists will be forced to admit that such theodicy has a partial point.

Much can be deduced about a society by the way it handles disasters. Science and statistical analysis make it easily possible to assess their likelihood, and to take measures to mitigate them when they occur. The thing is, there needs to be a political will to put the necessary preparations in place.

Much media attention in recent days has been focused on the Burmese junta’s callous disregard for the victims of Cyclone Nargis – pictured - for reasons most of us find difficult to comprehend. Can one of the world’s most repressive regimes really fear the presence of aid workers as a potential spark for insurrection?

China is getting a better press for the way it is tackling the Sichuan earthquake. But 300 years after Rousseau, it seems that jerrybuilt schools have claimed the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of pupils.

It’s not that advanced capitalisms have much claim to moral superiority, as anyone who recalls the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005 will be fully aware. From systematic neglect of obviously-needed flood defences to the mismanagement of relief efforts, the charge sheet against local, state and federal government is long.

Burma, China and the US are very different in political terms. Yet they do have one very important thing in common; all are class societies, in which the interests of the elite dictate that corners are cut in the provision of public goods.

A society organised along more rational and democratic lines might not be endowed with the power to suspend the laws of physics. But it will surely take simple steps that will save countless lives when the worst does happen.

It is all gruesomely redolent of the worst black on black violence of decades past, right down to such retro details as the return of necklacing. Those of us who campaigned against apartheid throughout these years will be asking themselves how the hell this can be happening in the Rainbow Nation.

After all, the downfall of the system that elevated racism to the organising principle of a continent’s most economically advanced state was – for the entirety of the left – the highlight of the early 1990s. Unlike the other major events shaping world politics in this period, there was no room for ambiguity. It simply had to be a good thing.

Yet the free elections of 1994, which inevitably meant black majority rule, seemed to invalidate one of the standard Trotskyist arguments of the period. The far left maintained that state racism was intrinsic to South African capitalism, and indeed, that the one could not exist without the other. The only road to black liberation, we insisted, was socialist revolution.

This wasn’t a popular position at the time. Inside the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Communist Party of Great Britain benefited from the reflected credibility of their South African Communist Party comrades, with the result that the SACP ‘stages theory’ line was pretty much the orthodoxy. Democratic capitalism first, socialism later, we were told. Don’t be so impatient.

After 14 years of African National Congress government, we are in a position to assess the results. South Africa’s economy has flourished of late, particularly wine production, mining and tourism, with growth topping 5% in recent years.

The ‘BEE policy’ – Black Economic Empowerment – has forced white-owned companies to sell substantial stakes to an emerging black bourgeoisie. A layer of the black population, much in the manner of the pigs on Animal Farm, now enjoy luxury lifestyle trappings once the exclusive preserve of wealthy whites. South African capitalism clearly is capable of functioning without apartheid. In that much, the Trots have been proven wrong.

But there has been little by way of trickle-down. Severe poverty has doubled in more than a decade, and more than four million people are still living on less than 50p a day. That many of their exploiters and oppressors now have black faces presumably matters little as far as they are concerned.

Clearly they are angry, and that anger has found a murderous outlet in anti-immigrant racism, as can be seen from the picture. The underlying process at work is similar to that seen in many other countries including Britain, namely resentment against competition from immigrants for jobs and housing.

The idea that the black working class should be questioning the social relations that keep them living in the worst accommodation, while carrying out the least desirable work for the lowest possible pay no more occurs to them than it does to British National Party voters on the sink estates of Barking and Dagenham.

To revisit a theoretical debate from the 1980s, the working people of South Africa are not going to achieve an acceptable standard of living without precisely the kind of transformation that an ANC wedded to neoliberalism will never attempt, either under Mbeki or Zuma. The Trots were right on that one.

Then factor in numerous social, demographic, health and environmental difficulties, including HIV/AIDS, a population explosion, simmering - and sometimes boiling - ethnic tension, endemic corruption, water shortage and the progressive degradation of agricultural land. Sometimes it is hard to hold out too much hope for this continent.

Last month I paid brief visits to Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda on a journalistic assignment. I have in earlier years reported from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Kenya and Tanzania. The trips have in addition prompted me to read some of the literature.

I have tried to think about African politics and economics as a Marxist, in the first instance considering the development of the productive forces, the class relations that brings about and the resultant ideological superstructure. Yet still I find it difficult to reach firm conclusions.

On the one hand, Africa has deindustrialised to an important extent since the 1980s, as the neoliberal policies introduced at the behest of the International Monetary Fund have lead to the destruction of entire sectors such as textiles.

City life certainly reflects this. As Mike Davis - politically close to the SWP, if not a member - points out in his book Planet of Slums, where the process of urbanisation in Europe and North America was characterised by a movement of former agricultural workers to big city manufacturing centres, Africa has instead seen urbanisation without industrialisation.

Large layers of city dwellers are either economically inactive or active only in 'the informal economy', desperately trying to subsist by selling lottery tickets to passing motorists.

On the other hand, the last period has seen a second scramble to extract Africa's abundant natural resources, which has led to the creation of a super-exploited and geographically concentrated proletarian layer.

Occasionally the organised working class has had a political impact. South Africa has sustained a mass black working class-based communist party, while Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change also has its roots in the labour movement.

But more often than not, what has passed for leftwing politics since independence has come in the shape of dictators - Nkrumah, Mengistu, even at one stage the cannibalistic soi distant emperor Bokassa - flirting with 'scientific socialism' in the cold war years.

The question - and Davis formulates this explicitly - is whether the African working class can rise to the level of what Marxists refer to as historical agency? Africa may not have unlimited time for the processes involved to work themselves out; either it solves its pressing problems within a couple of decades or many countries might degnerate into a Hobbesian nightmare.

Overly-simplistic class-based analytical paradigms rarely work in a part of the world where politics more often flows from tribal identities. Whether or not these identities are historically rooted or deliberate creations of the colonial powers - and they can be either - seems to matter little.

In some countries I saw an urban proletariat that - purely on an impressionistic basis - I would assess as having the same sort of social weight I have read about in accounts of Russia in the run up 1917. But none of these are countries where social formations are reportedly on the brink of collapse.

As I noted above, afro-optimism doesn't come easily. But I do know this; if there is hope it lies in the proles.

Back in 1995, in his role as political head of Bosnia’s Serbian irredentist minority, it was Radovan Karadzic - pictured after capture and in his hey-day - who signed the anodyne-sounding ‘Directive 7’. That’s exactly the kind of heading favoured by numerous regional administration officials the world over when issuing tediously dull documents that put the renewal of a municipally-owned water mains network out to tender.

Yet this was no humdrum local government mandate, destined to be taken halfway down the order paper of the relevant subcommittee. Directive 7 was an order to Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic to ‘create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope for further survival or live for the inhabitants’ of a town called Srebrenica

The result was the summary execution of 8,000 men, women and children, while United Nations-mandated Dutch peacekeeping forces simply looked on.

For 13 years since, Karadzic has found it only too easy to avoid capture, in a country where many are reportedly sympathetic to what he did. The likelihood is that if the government of Boris Tadic were not so keen to join the European Union, he would be at liberty still.

Comparisons to Hitler – advanced by Clinton era diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the main architect of the Dayton Accords – are ludicrously overblown. But Karadzic’s crimes certainly rank alongside those of such famous paper-shuffling Schreibtischtäter predecessors such as Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann may have killed one Jew directly with his own hands, although his defence team disputed even that claim. His culpability in the holocaust, however, was not in a moment’s doubt, even if all he did was sign off the orders.

The likelihood is that Karadzic will now end up before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. That will result in the predictable stream of denunciation from controversialists of a range of political standpoints, from the hardline nationalist right to sections of the Stalinist-influenced or self-appointed anti-imperialist left.

ICTY - based in the Hague - represents the purest form of victor’s justice, we are bound to be told. Its indictees are disproportionately Serbian or Montenegrin. The posthumous charges tabled against the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović were mere token gestures designed to give the court a semblance of neutrality.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO, maintains: "If the Karadzic case merits being considered in The Hague, then next to him in the dock should be those who took the decision to bomb entirely innocent people, hundreds of whom died during the 'democratisation' of the Balkans by the west."

Even legalistic quibbles are possible. ICTY was established by the UN Security Council rather of the UN General Assembly. When former Serb president Slobodan Milošević stood in the dock, the contention that the court therefore has no legal authority was central to his case.

Many similar points could have been raised in relation to Eichmann. Legally speaking, Israel had no right to abduct him from sovereign Argentina, and probably it would have been preferable for him to be tried in a neutral jurisdiction.

Maybe clemency could have been exercised and the death penalty commuted to life imprisonment. But it would be difficult to maintain that what happened to the Nazi was in any real sense a miscarriage of justice.

Tell you what. I’ll grant each and everyone of the above objections to what will happen to Karadzic to anyone who wishes to raise them. Just allow me this in return; it is morally right that he be called to account and it is morally right that he be severely punished.

in the nature of the case, there is no way that the impending trial can be anything other than victor's justice; but better that than impunity for mass murder.

I’m particularly taken by a couple of conversations over the last 24 hours. Alright, conceded a workmate from a Communist Party family background, the invasion is heavy-handed; but Georgia’s actions were a provocation and Saakashvili should have seen it coming.

Meanwhile, the former Trot union official I had a beer and a curry with last night informed me that while he felt sorry for the people of Gori, the blame for their misfortune rests entirely with their leadership.

Assorted blogosphere Stalinists and semi-Stalinists go further and take an openly pro-Soviet – sorry, I meant to say pro-Russian - line. In their eyes, Moscow’s invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia essentially amounts to humanitarian intervention. Not that they would ever use the term, but you see what I mean.

This is purest hypocrisy. The Kremlin is not motivated by any desire to defend Plucky Little South Ossetia and its Russian passport holders. If you want a graphic illustration of Russia’s true attitude to self-determination, remember all those pictures of the ruins of Grozny.

Its principle concern seems rather to undermine Georgia’s pro-western orientation and scupper Tblisi's chances of joining NATO, the better to further the strategic aim of securing political dominance in the energy-rich Caucasus.

It would take a peculiar kind of doublethink to designate such blatant acts of imperialism as somehow ‘anti-imperialist’, simply because the Russian game plan may cut across the interests of the US. But many leftists are more than capable of seeing things that way.

For instance, they point to the fact that Georgia’s armed forces are equipped and trained by the US, and jump from that to the conclusion that Georgia was acting as a US proxy in its initial incursion into South Ossetia. According to the semi-official online mouthpiece of Respect, the fighting thus amounts to ‘a war made in Washington’.

Such circumstantial evidence is hardly enough to establish the case. There seems no persuasive logic in the attribution of any external causality to what is essentially only the latest manifestation of tensions with deep historic roots.

None of this seeks to paint Georgia as somehow the heroic defender of democratic values, either, as Saakashvili clears tries to do an his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

This conflict is therefore about our common trans-Atlantic values of liberty and democracy. It is about the right of small nations to live freely and determine their own future. It is about the great power struggles for influence of the 20th century, versus the path of integration and unity defined by the European Union of the 21st.

Georgia is clearly the aggressor in this instance, and seems to have deliberately attacked Tskhinvali in the belief that the world would be otherwise engaged watching the Olympics opening ceremony on the telly.

Once, a fairly wide section of the left would have avoided lining up behind either the Russian or the Georgian ruling class, and restricted comment to a demand for the end of the fighting.

The only solution to the underlying problem is a political settlement based on the freely expressed wishes of those living in the territories concerned. That includes the right to affiliate to the Russian Federation if that is what the people wish. But vicarious cheerleading for the Red Army will not get us there any faster.

Politically, he is very much on the right. He is said to be closer to neoconservatism than any other ideological tendency, although not uncritically so. But although he really should invest in some better hair dye, he is clearly a highly intelligent man who analyses the world through the eyes of the US ruling class.

One of his best-known ideas is the concept of ‘the unipolar moment’, the title of an article he wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s. Krauthammer argued that with the demise of the USSR, the US would for perhaps three or four decades stand out as the world’s sole superpower.

This idea has achieved widespread currency. Vladimir Putin uses it his speeches, although his only disagreement with unipolarity is that Russia is not the unipole, while the word crops up in articles by leading British Marxists such as Alex Callinicos.

Throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s, unipolarity appeared pretty much a straightforward description of an international reality that has led some on the left to become sympathetic to anything and everything seen as undermining US hegemony.

Never mind that the class base of political Islamism is almost always bourgeois and very often antithetical to democracy; it’s a challenge to unipolarity, comrade. But in the final analysis, Islamism – even in the guise of a nuclear-armed Iran – can only represent an asymmetrical irritant to imperialism. The only real competition for a superpower state is another superpower state.

Now we might be getting just that, in the shape of the re-emergent nationalist Russia so evident in Georgia in recent days. It represents, in the words of Seumas Milne, ‘the return of some counterweight’.

Yet as with all paradigms developed by bourgeois social science, unipolarity and multipolarity - the antonym buzzword - need to be handled with care. Because revolutionary socialists are implacably opposed to US imperialism, it does not follow that we are therefore indifferent to what undermines it.

That should be especially the case for those that claim to stand in the tradition of socialism from below. Our desire is for the self-organised working class to challenge the global rule of capital; our attitude to other agencies that inconvenience or cut across the plans of our ruling class is purely tactical.

Russia’s foreign policy is a case in point. As an orthodox Trotskyist student in the 1980s, I used to argue that Moscow’s support for what the entire left then refered to as national liberation struggles was objectively progressive.

No one then could have know what a bunch of corrupt petrocrats the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola would turn out to be, but that is beside the point.

It is now possibly to see Russia’s involvement in Africa for what it was, namely the pursuit of geostrategic self-interest; I don’t think its intervention in the Caucasus deserves any different description.

Now of course, nothing the internationalist left does or thinks right now has no impact on global politics. If Russia or China become strong enough to challenge unipolarity in the next period, all we can do as Marxists is analyse the process and take an attitude accordingly.

The question is, should the left necessarily have a preference for multipolarity per se over unipolarity? Is it somehow intrinsically healthier? Does the flavour in which the ‘counterweight’ comes count for anything, or does it just have to be a good thing, however you slice it?

Swathes of the left seem to see international relations as a sort of zero sum game. Putin’s triumph is supposed to mean that a reified ‘American imperialism’ has suffered a setback and been weakened accordingly. Well, maybe. But offset against that, the resultant nationalist fervour that this is going to generate will make things a lot harder for Russia’s small groups of genuine socialists.

In short, there is nothing about the television pictures of Russian tanks rolling over another country’s border and shooting up Gori that particularly gladdens my heart.

So is it simply that my old far left reflexes have atrophied, or has our application of historical materialism really deteriorated to the level of ‘it’s always in our favour when the yanks get a bloody good kicking’?

It rather seems to us that if you take the political equivalent of a tasteless low-calorie banana milkshake and water it down further with a top-up dose of triangulation, the resultant ideological mush is still something best categorised as centrism.

Yet American liberalism has seen better days. While the Democrats never were the sort of mass working-class party along the lines we are familiar with on this side of the Atlantic, we are still within living memory of the era when it essentially constituted the automatic alignment of choice for trade unionists, ethnic minorities and progressive intellectuals, and even for some groups that described themselves as socialist.

No figure incarnates those years more powerfully than Ted Kennedy (pictured), the last man standing of the New Deal coalition. I cannot think of a British politician of comparable age who evokes quite the same widespread nostalgia for the more optimistic times that predated our wretched decades of neoliberalism triumphant.

So the meaning of the senior senator from Massachusetts’ speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week can only be unequivocally clear; Barack Obama has inherited the apostolic succession of Camelot.

‘And this November the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans,’ Kennedy averred, before moving on to call for an ‘America of high principle and bold endeavour’.

But I fear that anybody who believes such rhetoric - and I have left-leaning American friends that have talked themselves into believing that rhetoric, and will brand me a cynic for not believing it too - is facing disappointment.

Consider the current progressive wish-list, for instant. American liberals want to see unconditional withdrawal from Iraq, more money for welfare and less money for the military, reversal of the Bush administration’s rich-folk-only tax cuts, a widescale switch to alternative energy sources, and guaranteed healthcare for all. And these are all good, reasonable, moderate and not even remotely earth-shaking things to want.

But they will not be delivered by a man who repeatedly lays stress on his courtship of Republican dissidents, appoints free trade-crazy Wall Streeters as his key economic advisers, and freely advertises his backtracking on abortion rights and gun control.

These are not the stances of a 'leftist', no matter what you read in the Weekly Standard or the op-ed pages of the WSJ, and irregardless of what you hear preached from the pulpit of the local megachurch.

By his own lights, Obama is perfectly correct to act like this. Liberal America hasn’t got the voter numbers to provide the keys to the Oval Office. So - like New Labour in the 1990s - he figures that the core vote can be appeased by repeated incantation of the words ‘hope’ and ‘change’ and ‘yes we can’ at more or less random intervals while he tailors his policies to suit the Obamacans.

Tragically, the American left lacks the self-confidence to reassert itself and will do nothing other than acquiesce. It will not advance its agenda until it comes up with a fit-for-purpose vehicle.

It is always a bit icky watching middle age men fall head over heels with women that are way out of their league.

But a sizeable number of those rightwing pundits whose hearts were broken by the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher appear to have gone gaga for McCain's US presidential running mate Sarah Palin (pictured). The lust and the longing in what they write is barely concealed.

In terms of centre-right female politicians on the world stage, I suppose she almost qualifies as a bit of a hottie, if Angela Merkel is taken as the relevant yardstick. But steady on, chaps. All a bit sudden, isn’t it?

Simon Heffer in the Telegraph is one of those who listened to what Palin had to say on Wednesday night and came away deeply impressed:

She is an astounding politician. In nearly 25 years of being paid to sit through political speeches, I struggle to think of one I have heard that was more immediately successful and that will prove to have been such a moment in history.

Hang on a minute; all the woman has done so far is to show that she can competently deliver a ghost-written attack dog speech. That’s a useful enough ability to have as a politico, but one that lots of people can deliver that one.

Palin remains an unknown quantity. Until the last week or so, few political commentators in the US could have had anything more than a cursory awareness of who she was; it’s a fair bet that most of the hacks who have compiled profiles of her on this side of the Atlantic had even heard of her.

As a journalist myself, I’ve obviously got nothing against columnists who make stuff up as they go along. But Richard Littlejohn’s outpourings in the Daily Mail this morning are a classic of the genre. Let’s subject it to a quick fisk:

Sarah Palin is every Guardianista's worst nightmare.

Worst nightmare? Naaah, mate. As a paid up leftie, plenty of things keep me awake at night. But the prospect of a Republican veep is not even in the top ten. The job is essentially idiot proof. One need only remember the tenure of a certain J Danforth Quayle to underline that point.

But if Palin is a Guardianista’s nightmare, she is patently Uncle Rich’s wet dream:

Sarah Palin is every red-blooded redneck's fantasy figure, every randy schoolboy's Mrs Robinson … Cheerleader, beauty queen, dominatrix of the Harper Valley PTA …

You what? Back in the 1970s I was a randy schoolboy myself. I dreamt of being deflowered by various sultry temptresses in the fourth form, any number of page 3 pin-ups, and in the optimum scenario, I wanted to break my duck with Suzi Quatro. But certainly not anybody on Wellingborough Grammar School Parent Teacher Association.

Interesting, the normally staid Blairite Martin Kettle – writing in the Guardian – brands Palin ‘a political dominatrix from the Arctic’. Is there an Ice Maiden vibe going on, maybe?

Perhaps such disturbing visions say it all about the sexuality about gentlemen of a certain age. Perhaps I am just missing something here.

But back to Littlejohn. He accuses the left of gratuitously playing the hockey mom and not the ball when tackling Palin:

What they are doing is what they usually do when confronted with something which offends their world view - character assassination … A supermarket tabloid is claiming she had an affair, which she denies.

Sure. Character assassination. Leftie speciality, innit? I mean, the US right would never stoop that low. Or would they? I seem to remember last time round, when Fox News and their ilk managed to contrast the military service records of draft dodger Dubya and Vietnam vet John Kerry, and somehow find Kerry wanting in patriotism.

More recently, the US conservative media scuppered John Edwards’ bid for the Democratic nomination with revelations that he was partial to a spot of extramarital. That’s politics these days. And before getting all self-righteous on this one, let’s not forget that the Daily Mail – not an organ of the left, one is forced to concede - splashed Palin’s ‘denied affair’ story across two pages.

You've just got to like a woman who calls her son after a character in Only Fools And Horses. Although it's probably fair to assume she doesn't have a working knowledge of Cockney rhyming slang, otherwise her daughter would never have been christened Bristol.

This is one of Littlejohn’s better points. It’s worth noting that the Palin offspring rejoice in the monikers Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and, er, Trig. It's only surprising she didn't call one of them Swindon. Who could vote for a mother inconsiderate enough to inflict that on her kids?

What she does have in spades is experience of the energy industry - the number one concern right now. Palin would drill, drill and drill some more - polar bears or no polar bears.

Finally, we get to the nub of the matter. Palin is square with the oil industry. So that’s alright, then.

Lastly, Littlejohn signs off with the by now obligatory Thatch comparison:

Remember, they all laughed at Margaret Thatcher. But ho, ho, ho, who had the last laugh?

Well, not the three million unemployed or Britain’s mining communities or the Falklands dead, that’s for certain, Richard.

We’ll see whether Palin gets in or not. But the reality is, whoever takes over at the White House next year, Democrat or Republican, they will serve the interests of the US ruling class that put them there. One way or the other, it won’t make a whole lot of difference to the genuine left.

THE MEN and women Franco murdered were socialists, progressive nationalists, anarchists, democrats, trade unionists, republicans, liberals, anti-clerical activists, feminists, communists and Trotskyists; in short, exactly the kind of people that read this blog.

Now Spain is to reopen 19 mass graves, exhuming the remains of victims of the former clerical-fascist dictatorship, as part of a criminal investigation into the regime’s crimes during the civil war of 1936-39 and the years that followed.

And as one Madrid-based historian reiterates, these were not random slayings, either: It was virtually genocide … It came from the top, it was systematic, and they had planned it before the war began. Documents exist showing that, if the coup failed, they would set in motion this policy of extermination

But when you reopen tombs, you inevitably risk reopening long dormant social fissures as well. The argument that it would be better to keep both firmly closed is not nugatory. So it is at least incumbent on the left to ask what the point of the exercise is, and whether or not the proposed means are likely to achieve the desired ends.

Different countries judge troubled history in different ways. The Nuremberg trials were externally imposed on Germany, and subsequent Entnazifizierung was never comprehensive.

France prosecuted Vichy collaborators in a series of trials that continued into the 1990s. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission guaranteed kid glove treatment to the architects of apartheid.

In eastern Europe, Stalinist bureaucrats routinely reinvented themselves as democratic politicians. Only in Germany and – to a lesser extent - Poland have many of them suffered sanctions.

Spain, by contrast, has been determined to fudge Franquismo by trying to pretend it never happened. Indeed, a 1977 amnesty law passed during the transition to democracy was a clear indicator that these matters were then judged too sensitive for anybody to be brought to book.

Now this notion has been challenged by Baltasar Garzón, the man who first hit the headlines in this country ten years ago with his admirable attempt to extradite Chilean caudillo General Pinochet.

The judge has published a 68-page document, stressing that around 114,000 people ‘disappeared’ over the 15 years following Franco’s rebellion against a democratically elected republican administration, right in the middle of the tensest decade in European history. He wants to put those responsible on retrospective trial.

The emotional impact of the initiative may well be lost on many Britons, who do not share the experiences of fascism, Stalinism or military occupation common to most other European nations within living memory.

In the abstract, this is a simple question of justice. But no section of Spanish society can expect to duck the spotlight. If Garzón is to be credible, he will also need to consider the arguments from the country's political right. There were serious – albeit smaller scale - atrocities on the part of the good guys, too.

The republicans were complicit in the massacre of 16,000 nuns, monks and priests in the first three months of the conflict alone, while Stalin’s NKVD death squads in Barcelona are responsible for the brutal extrajuridicial killing of numerous far leftists.

And it's no small point either that all of the perpetrators singled out by Garzón – Franco and 34 of his generals and ministers – all now dead. We are already aware of their names and their ugly and evil histories; what purpose will posthumous conviction serve?

Some kind of increment of moral satisfaction may accrue to surviving victims - or more likely their descendents - of course. Good. But I am not logically convinced that they will concretely be any better off as a result of a formal finding that those they already know to be guilty were indeed guilty.

We know, too, that some extremely elderly individual war criminals survive. They are largely ninety-somethings, and thus will typically be subject to severe physical and mental infirmities. Should they stand trial as well?

In the liberal democracy that Spain thankfully is today, the death penalty is clearly out of the question, even if one were able to prove the commission of crimes that arguably merit that sanction.

I can see why some people believe they should be behind bars. But the incarceration of elderly and frail individuals – even elderly and frail fascists - can amount to nothing more than a gesture.

The consensus on the Spanish left is that the inquiry should go ahead and must reach its only logical conclusion, in the grounds that this will help Spain overcome past divisions.

As a detached observer, on balance I come down on their side. But in the final analysis, the symbolism here is probably key. One way and another, Franquismo may have killed 500,000.

Largely because it is important for future generations not to be under the impression that such actions can meet with impunity, Garzón’s move is the correct path of action. What he seeks to do has to be done, if for the historical record alone.

Conservative paper El Mundo brands what the judge is attempting as ‘a bloodless form of vengeance’, and that assessment is accurate enough. Yet bloodless vengeance seems justified in the circumstances. The Spanish right should remember that not so long ago, acts of national retribution tended to be very bloody indeed.

YESTERDAY the Financial Times - a free market business newspaper not normally considered the voice of the British left - endorsed Barack Obama as ‘the better choice’ for president of the United States. And, compared to John McCain, the only other contender that could possibly win next week, he certainly is that.

Not only is he blessed with considerable gifts of charisma and oratory, he clearly fought the better campaign. To cap it all, McCain's running mate Sarah Palin - a woman initially the object of schoolboy crushes on the part of many rightwing commentators over here - has on any yardstick revealed herself unfit to be considered a serious potential veep.

After what we have been through in the last eight years, the likely arrival of a relatively liberal black man in the White House will - for reasons of symbolism alone - be greeted by many on the left internationally as a step forward. But I somehow doubt that the enthusiasm will last for long.

As the FT editorial makes plain, president Obama will inevitably disappoint his progressive base of support, both domestically and in other countries. His political DNA makes him organically incapable of the kind of radicalism necessary to tackle racism and poverty, or to disembroil the US from Afghanistan and Iraq, to name but some of the more pressing tasks.

Were I part of the American electorate, I would most likely back a token socialist candidate if one was on the ballot paper. or otherwise abstain. That said, if I lived in a swing state, I would not consider a tactical vote inadmissible on principle, given what the alternative outcome would represent.

Yet tactical voting probably will not be necessary. The Democrat has a commanding lead in the opinion polls, and some Republicans are publicly fearful of an Obama landslide in the making.

It is a measure of the desperation of the McCain camp that they have unearthed a 2001 radio interview in which Obama makes some mildly redistributionist remarks, and are trying to push the line that this makes him some kind of 'socialist'.

The idea that Obama is some kind of closet dangerous red is patently laughable; if he has ever uttered anything that would put him much to the left of the mildest European centrist, I have yet to hear it.

The thing is, isn’t it a bit ironic to knock Obama for redistributionism on the very day that the Bush administration began to dish out money to the private sector as part of its plan to get the credit markets back on their feet?

As of now, the US government now holds equity in nine banks and is the major shareholder of a formerly private insurance giant AIG. McCain supported the plan; to hear him turn around and attack redistribution will strike many left of centre observers as just that little bit rich. Not for nothing is it said that the yanks don't do irony.

IT LOOKS as if the world is watching the opening days of the third civil war to devastate the Democratic Republic of Congo in little more than a decade. And just as was the case on the previous two occasions, there do not seem to be any realistic resolutions on offer.

Situations of this complexity somehow seem to defy the capacity of the standard toolbox of concepts employed in international relations analysis. Simplistic socialist appeals to class politics and the organisations of the working class simply have no purchase on the realities on the ground in a part of the world where alignment largely flows from tribal identity. Trade unions and quasi-Maoist currents are known to have existed in the past, but as far as I am aware, do so no longer.

Even for those sections of the left that buy into the framework of humanitarian intervention – something that should surely be acceptable to socialists only in the most extreme circumstances – will be mindful that the DRC already hosts 17,000 UN troops, the largest such deployment anywhere in the world. Yet even two or three times that number of soldiers could not feasibly be expected meaningfully to maintain peace in a country the size of western Europe.

Perhaps the most practical immediate step would be for Britain – in its capacity as the main bilateral donor to neighbouring Rwanda – to make it plain to Kinshasa that its inflammatory if clandestine intervention in support of Rwandan business interests is not acceptable. Other countries with diplomatic leverage in the region should likewise warn off any other governments that might be considering entering the fray. However, what good such efforts will do is another matter.

Yet to spell out how we got to where we are now is considerably easier than coming up with any answers; while in normal circumstances it would be gratuitously offensive to compare a country with a woman who has been the victim of repeated brutal gang rapes, that seems to be about the only fitting simile for the experience of DRC since the Congress of Berlin.

Almost all African nations were, by the end of the nineteenth century, formally speaking colonies of one European power or another. But what was then known as the Congo Free State was unique in being the de jure personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, under whose reign over 10 million Congolese were to perish from disease and exploitation. So horrifying was his rule that international pressure forced the state of Belgium to regularise the situation in 1908.

Five years after independence in 1960 - which itself led to civil war with Belgian intervention to topple Moscow-aligned Patrice Lumumba – the country fell into the clutches of a man called Mobutu Sese Seko. As it turned out, he proved to be no run of the mill African dictator.

Sponsored by the US on account of his impeccable anti-communism, he proceeded to built a viciously repressive regime largely geared almost entirely to his personal enrichment. There have even been claims that the word ‘kleptocracy’ was coined expressly in his honour. By 1984, Mobutu was sitting on a $4bn fortune in his personal Swiss bank account, a huge sum at the time and an amount of the same order as the country’s national debt.

It took the civil war of 1996-97 to force him to flee the country. But peace was not established; in a spillover from the Rwanda genocide, a second outbreak of fighting soon sucked in half a dozen regional powers.

The main attraction was not ideological support for any of the contending forces, but rather the prospect of getting a slice of DRC’s vast natural resources, which include gold, diamonds, copper and coltan, a key raw material for mobile phones of the type you probably have sitting in your pocket. The result was a conflict that claimed 5.4m lives, making it the most bloody since the second world war.

History now looks set to repeat itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as tragedy and the third time live on CNN.

A BLACK British trade union activist I met this week was naturally jubilant about the result of the US presidential election. But just one thing is marring his excitement; he is fearful that even now, someone is planning to gun down Barack Obama.

So presumably Monty will be horrified to learn that you can get odds on just that outcome. Irish bookmaker Paddy Power is offering 12-1 - down from 16-1 yesterday morning - that Obama will not finish his first term; and yes, the firm will pay out if he stops a sniper's bullet.

Such an idea clearly isn’t fanciful or outlandish. Four US presidents – Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F Kennedy – all died at the hand of an assassin; so did many notable African-American leaders, such as Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther.

Every president since Nixon has been the subject of death plots, with assassination attempts actually carried out against Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

The chances against some sort of attack on Obama can only be regarded as high, to a degree that makes the odds available at the bookies look generous. Remember that even during the recent campaigning, two neo-Nazi murder conspiracies against the eventual winner came to light.

The most recently uncovered case centres on Paul Schlesselman and Daniel Cowart, a pair of smalltown skinheads given to such pranks as chalking swastikas on pavements. They even painted ‘honk if you love Hitler’ on the bumper of Cowart’s Honda Civic. That should give you an idea of the mentalities we are dealing with here.

Schlesselman and Cowart recently pleaded not guilty to dreaming up a scheme to shoot dead 88 blacks, behead a further 14, and then top their outrage by donning white tuxedos and top hats in a bid to slay Obama in a drive-by shooting.

But serious assassins do not discuss their ambitions on the internet. Could a more credible threat emerge? That frightening possibility is considered in a chilling report published by political forecasting consultancy Stratfor, which concludes that the risk is real, with white supremacists by far the most likely perpetrators.

As things stand, mainstream white supremacist opinion – if that phrase isn’t a contradiction in terms – is divided on its assessment of the merits of murder. A number of leading names in this milieu, including David Duke and Tom Metzger, maintain that Obama’s triumph is actually a good thing from their perspective. Fear of a black president will see their movement grow, as rednecks rush to sign up.

Others would actively love to see Obama killed, in a scenario recognisably derived from the playbook of the Italian far right and its notion of ‘a strategy of tension’. The assassination of Obama would polarise the US racially, inevitably sparking off massive riots and triggering the conditions for all-out race war.

The most paranoid section of the movement argues that the Zionist Occupation Government will do away with Obama itself, shift the blame by framing up a white supremacist, and then use the event as a pretext to bring in gun control and restrictions on hate speech.

Stratfor also looks at the possibility of a lone wolf assailant, perhaps funded and trained by hostile foreign governments. While it is obviously possible for US intelligence agencies to keep some kind of tabs on organised neo-Nazis, surveillance of every whack job with an automatic simply cannot be achieved.

Plenty of column inches this week have been devoted to the proposition that, by the act of electing a black president, America has achieved catharsis on its racist past. That a significant threshold has been crossed is indubitably true. But it is important not to forget that not everybody in the country has crossed it.

PIRACY is one of the specialist subjects I cover as a journalist, and the news that a Somali gang has captured Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, laden with crude oil equivalent to a quarter of the daily output of the world’s number one producer, is making the headlines in many major news outlets right now.

Viewers of GMTV and Press Association news feeds, as well as listeners to RTE, BBC Radio Scotland and NPR in the US, have already heard my opinions on the topic. Apologies to al Jazeera and ABC, but I just couldn't fit them in.

While it takes an incident of this nature to generate mainstream media attention, it is worth stressing that this situation is both ongoing and rapidly moving out of control; over 30 ships have been taken by the Somalis so far this year.

Things have reached the point where many shipowners are avoiding the Suez Canal, precisely because using it makes proximity to the Horn of Africa unavoidable, and are routing round the Cape of Good Hope instead, a move that can add 15-21 days to steaming times.

To some extent, this trend inexorably feeds on itself. It is understandable that shipowners pay seven figure dollar ransoms to secure the return of their crews and vessels. But every time they do so, they make the next attack that much more likely.

There is nothing progressive in the Somali piracy phenomenon. Any justification advanced in terms of surrogate taxation for illegal fishing, for instance, is clearly spurious. What we are witnessing is armed robbery at sea, targeted against generally unionised seafarers who clearly have a right to be sail unmolested in international waters.

There have been widespread calls for tougher naval action, and there are already many warships in the area, ranging from NATO assets to a Russian frigate. But given the millions of square miles of sea they are expected to cover, the pirate attacks continue.

Ultimately, the only way to eradicate Somali piracy is a democratic settlement in a country that is experiencing something much like the state of nature described in Hobbes. Without a functioning central authority, the pirate gangs effectively have a free hand.

Ironically, it is worth remembering that the problem briefly disappeared during the shortlived domination of Mogadishu by the Union of Islamic Courts, which instituted the death penalty for the crime.

But this is not a country where the standard analyses of political science or international relations apply. The fighting – which has gone on for two decades - is not about left versus right; it is more to do with clan against clan than class against class.

Some on the left may be tempted by comparisons between one or other of the insurgent factions and the national liberation movements of the past. While some groupings - most notably al Shabaab - claim religious motivation, at root all are essentially warlord-led and clan-aligned militias, out for a larger slice of the meagre national pie.

Any groups which do have influence and support in the country – and that clearly includes the radical Islamists – will inevitably have to participate in any peace deal that stands a chance of working. That is the most, I feel, that can be said.

THE ONLY surprising thing about the reception accorded to the Global Trends 2025 report is that anybody is at all surprised at its findings. The National Intelligence Council’s argument that the US is in relative decline will hardly come as a shock to anybody who reads books on international relations or the world economy.

British-born historian Paul Kennedy made the case in the late 1980s in his influential book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. More recently, Socialist Workers’ Party leader John Rees has offered a Marxist take on the proposition in Imperialism and Resistance.

Empirical attestation of the diminution of American standing is ample. Let’s start with the economic sphere. Using such yardsticks as national GDP as a proportion of world output, the US has been on a downward trend since the end of the second world war.

Globalisation has substantially eroded the country’s industrial base. Entire sectors – furniture production, consumer electronics, automobile parts, and computer manufacture – are all but non-existent.

So far, it has largely been able to shield itself from the consequences of all this, largely because it is the only nation able to conduct global business in its own currency. Anybody who wants to trade in dollars has to purchase them in the US, an expedient that works wonders in making good the capital account deficit.

At present, two-thirds of all currency reserves are held in greenbacks. The bad news, as the NIC recognises, is that the rise of the euro means that this happy state of affairs is unlikely to obtain forever.

Militarily, the US was at its apex during the ‘unipolar moment’ famously celebrated by Charles Krauthammer after the collapse of the USSR. America’s edge in arms technology during the 1990s gave the impression that Washington had the capability to wage unlimited virtual wars at very low cost in US lives, as seen in the Gulf conflict and Kosova.

After Iraq, things don’t quite look that way any more. True, US armed forces would easily defeat any other conventional military force on the planet if the two sides were to slug it out face to face.

But nobody wants to play it that way anymore. Force of numbers – and lack of support among the majority community – will probably mean the eventual defeat of the Iraqi insurgency, but the US would be ill-advised to push its luck elsewhere and prove that the notion of ‘imperial overstretch’ is not just a nicely-turned phrase.

The obvious question is what the left should read into this picture. Rees’s basic argument is that increased competition between rival capitalisms – which he considers as fused with their respective states – will lead to a period of heightened tension between them, with war the most likely result. The ‘new imperialism’, to his mind, is essentially a rerun of the pre-1914 movie, and we all know how that one ended.

That conclusion shouldn’t go unchallenged. Of course there will be tensions and rivalries between capitalist states, but mechanisms such as the G8 and the Bretton Woods organisations now exist as intermediaries that can hammer out a common line.

Rees also underestimates the extent of economic interdependence generated by globalisation. As the last six decades and more underlines, it isn’t necessary physically to occupy any given territory in order to exploit its markets and resources, and it is possible to arrange peacefully to share the spoils.

This is not to argue that we are now seeing the embodiment of the ultra-imperialism envisaged by Kautsky, but there does appear to be something the famous renegade’s underlying idea.

In the long run, China is the most obvious challenger to US hegemony. But in relative rather than absolute terms, both its economy and its armed forces are a long way off parity. Moreover, it is dependent on the US as both the main provider of its capital and the main market for its goods.

Extrapolating what has happened in China over the last two decades will not do as a prognosis for the 20 years ahead, not least because of the rising social tensions and worker militancy on display.

World peace may currently be brittle, but fortunately it is rather less so than it was during the Cold War. Ransacking history in pursuit of passably serviceable parallels is surely a poor way to analyse the present.

THE BODIES are still being counted in Mumbai, and the blame for the atrocities has yet to be allocated. But it is already amply clear exactly which country constitutes the chief suspect.

Claims from unnamed Indian government ‘insiders’ over the weekend that seven of the perpetrators were British – including two from Leeds, one from Bradford and one from Hartlepool - now thankfully seem discounted.

The key question is whether Pakistan had anything to do with the carnage; while full details have yet to emerge, the likely answer is a straightforward ‘yes’.

One captured attacker has apparently admitted membership of the Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba. Such a confession has intuitive plausibility, not least because Islamists in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir have often used the divided territory as a base for terror attacks elsewhere, most notably India.

And Lashkar-e-Toiba is known to enjoy support from sections of the Pakistani state, most notably the intelligence service ISI. But simply to accuse Islamabad of pulling the strings here will not do. Irrespective of who is in government in Pakistan, the ISI is an autonomous unit, beyond any semblance of democratic control.

Nor will it do to airbrush out grounded suspicion of ISI involvement by suggesting that ‘the real reason’ that India has become a target for terrorism is its ‘increasingly prominent role as an ally of US imperialism’.

From everything we know so far, there is no good cause to think that the horrific killing spree was motivated by any sophisticated analysis of the workings of international politics. The grudge at hand is very much India’s brutality in Kashmir, and that is unfinished business from the Raj, not in any way related to the recent nuclear deal between New Delhi and Washington.

As the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September and last year’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto underline, ISI-sponsored groups are entirely capable of destruction on home soil. Politics in South Asia does not reduce itself to the simplistic ‘imperialism versus anti-imperialism’ narrative proclaimed by sections of the far left.

Islamism in Pakistan, at least in its modern format, emerged in the 1970s, deliberately encouraged by dictator General Zia ul Haq, the better to undermine support for secular parties that opposed him.

In the following decade, the very same US imperialism some portray as an indirect target of last week’s bloodshed offered cash and training to Islamist groupings in Pakistan, in support of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin fighters in Afghanistan.

After 9/11, the US and Britain openly propped up the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf as part of the masterplan behind the Global War on Terror, pumping $10bn into the country.

But through repeated military strikes within Pakistan, aimed at killing Afghan insurgents holed up on the other side of the border, the US has almost entirely succeeded in alienating any internal constituency it may have built.

The only solution that is going to work is a political settlement on the Kashmir issue. Without that, hotels are going to burn and burn and burn, in Pakistan as much as in India.

INSIDE every geeky bespectacled leftie bloke who ever stood outside a factory at 6 am on a rainy Friday morning, signally failing to sell Trot papers to the early shift, there is a little bit of Che Guevara trying to get out.

Secretly, we’d all like to make love to numerous beautiful women before launching a string of brave but ultimately futile insurrections in randomly-selected third world countries, even if it does mean dying young. The prospect sure as hell beats sitting through yet another interminable district aggregate, and hey, the posters and T-shirts alone would guarantee immortality of a kind.

Testimony to the man’s enduring appeal is the release early next month of two Steven Soderbergh biopics, imaginatively titled Che: Part 1 and Che: Part 2. The first installment was reviewed in The Sun last Saturday, and I for one was glad to see Britain’s best-selling tabloid openly express its solidarity with the Cuban Trotskyists imprisoned by the Castro regime in the 1960s. Better late then never.

Sun film critic Grant Rollings emphasises that Guevara is personally responsible for ordering a large number of executions - somewhere between 180 and ‘thousands’ - and history indeed attests that this is the case. In some instances, he pulled the trigger himself.

What did come as news to me were a number of quotations Rollings attributes to CG, which include the following blood-thirsty sentences:

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.

If that is not alarming enough, Guevara is said to have been disappointed that Khruschchev wussed out on the Cuban missile crisis:

If the nuclear missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the heart of the US, including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.

This, from a man who is also supposed to have said: ‘If you tremble indignation at every injustice, then you a comrade of mine.’ Now, I reckon I have got a fair - but obviously not comprehensive - grasp of the literature on recent Cuban history, and I have not previously come across these claims.

Does anybody know whether they are genuine, or simply the product of the imagination of some bourgeois exile scumbag in Miami? Is there any context to take into account? To prove your point, either cite a credible source, or else satisfactorily demonstrate that they are falsifications. I genuinely have an open mind here.

ISRAEL is not behaving like a civilised nation; that inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as one. Even its strongest supporters must be finding it difficult to mount a positive case.

The third day of the bombardment of Gaza has taken the death toll to over 300, including four young sisters killed when a bomb aimed at a nearby mosque missed its target. Some 1,400 have been injured. Even as I write, warships are reportedly bombarding the strip’s rudimentary port facilities. Welcome to Operation Cast Lead.

There have been debates in many British trade unions - including my own, the National Union of Journalists - centred on demands for a labour movement boycott of the state of Israel. I now suspect that I have lacked clarity on this issue. Sadly, prevarication is no longer tenable.

Opponents of such a move have typically argued that the country should not be ‘uniquely demonised’, and indeed, it should not be uniquely demonised. But minus any religious overtones and rhetorical flamboyance, demonise is in this context is simply a more elaborate synonym for condemn, and Israel’s action certain does deserve condemnation.

What are the viable comparators here? Tolstoy famously notes that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and likewise each odious administration finds its own specialities in human rights abuses.

Burma, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, China, Zimbabwe; all manage to be unequivocally execrable in one degree or another, irrespective of the way some on the left try to grade them into ‘pro-imperialist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ regimes. But it’s not our job to play favourites. Let us demonise the lot of them.

Perhaps we can best compare what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip right now with Russia’s treatment of Chechnya. But nobody is pretending that Russia is a liberal democracy. The irony is, history shows that brutal repression is never a solution. The tactic simply doesn’t work, as Tel Aviv will find out to its cost.

I wish I could be outside the Israeli embassy in London at this afternoon’s protest, although unfortunately other commitments preclude that. In the meantime, if the issue of labour movement sanctions comes up inside the NUJ once more, I shall reluctantly be forced to back the call.

Yes, I am fully aware that that will align me with political elements I don’t really find savoury, but I cannot see what other choice there is; while I used to be on the middle ground in this debate, Israel has demolished that space, just as surely as it has levelled Gaza’s interior ministry.

PERHAPS the most dispiriting aspect of the invasion of the Gaza Strip is the utter pointlessness of the exercise; while military victory is all but certain, at every other level, Israel can only be the loser.

Decades of refusal to allow Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not left it even marginally more secure, and its current savage actions will only serve further to galvanise support for Hamas.

The brutalities that the Israel Defense Forces are perpetrating right now guarantee the rocket launchers and the suicide bombers more recruits then they will know what to do with, for a generation and more to come.

Meanwhile, the 100:1 ratio of the death tolls has horrified liberal opinion everywhere. Even the European Commission is now openly accusing Israel of breaching humanitarian law.

What, then, can possibly be the motivation of Israel’s political establishment for a course of action both murderous in the literal sense and spectacularly misconceived at the strategic level?

One issue is of course the need to restore IDF credibility in the wake of the Lebanon debacle. Then there is the desire of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak to out-Netanyahu Netanyahu himself in the run up to general elections next month. Why should they concern themselves with the growing pile of corpses – and they are 99% Palestinian corpses, after all – when such vital issues of credibility are at stake?

Let it be stressed at once that the open admiration for the reactionary Islamists of Hamas – so obviously on display in some quarters of the left - is profoundly misplaced.

Nevertheless, the organisation won the Palestinian elections in 2006 because it articulated opposition to Israeli oppression, and because of popular revulsion at the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. That gives it an undeniable popular mandate and makes it central to the quest for a solution, whether we like that reality or not.

Opinions as to what constitutes a viable settlement to the Palestine question differ, and at times like this, all of them seem somewhat chimeric. But a precondition of ever reaching one is an Israeli leadership that is both aware of the extent of the injustices meted out since 1948 and determined to rectify them. That is clearly not the Israeli leadership we see right now.

IN AS far as it is possible to talk in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’ when discussing Israeli politics, Israel looks like it will make a sharp turn to the right in the wake of the recent brutal incursion into Gaza.

With a general election set for tomorrow, Tzipi Livni’s nominally centrist Kadima party is apparently eroding the opinion poll lead earlier enjoyed by Binyamin Netanyahu's indubitably right-wing Likud.

But Labour - the natural party of government for much of the country’s history - is likely to fall back to fourth place, pushed aside in the number three slot by Yisrael Beiteinu. That will leave the Moldovan-born former nightclub bouncer who heads the far right outfit making the decision about who will get to be the next prime minister.

That such a man should have such power is a worrying prospect. Avigdor Lieberman’s democratic credentials are open to question. One leading Israeli newspaper has alleged that he is an ex-member of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s illegal far right racist grouping Kach, formally designated a terrorist organisation by both the US and the EU.

To give you a flavour of his current politics, he advocates the execution of any Arab members of the knesset [Israeli parliament] who meet with representatives of Hamas; say what you like about the latter’s politics, but remember Hamas secured a plurality of votes in the properly-conducted Palestinian legislative assembly elections of three years ago, and therefore has a mandate. Lieberman, in other words, opposes meaningful dialogue.

A Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu coalition, the most likely outcome of tomorrow’s vote, would arrest prospects for political movement of any kind. Neither the type of two state solution advocated by Kadima - which in any case amounts to little more than a proposal for a bantustan for Arabs - nor a return to the 1967 borders will be on the table. As for any advance towards the sort of substantive secular democracy that can alone accommodate all religious traditions and ethnicities, forget about it.

Instead, we are likely to get an expansion of the existing settlements on the West Bank, perhaps altering demographics to the point where a two state solution in any variant is rendered impossible.

However much the recent bloodshed has reinforced some of the most reactionary elements in Israeli society, the tragic reality is that continued denial of the Palestinians’ legitimate political rights will not and cannot make Israelis any more secure.

The sine qua non for any conceivable settlement necessitates Israeli admission of the historic wrongs perpetrated to Palestinians, and massive compensation for the dispossession, pauperization, marginalisation and savage oppression wrought on Palestinians for more than five decades.

Netanyahu and Lieberman are not the politicians to deliver on that premise. Their victory would be a retrograde development for the entire Middle East.

HUGO Chavez is plainly not the Lenin of our days, but then neither is he a standard issue Latin American caudillo, either. Yet there is something about his style of government that renders commentators on both left and right incapable of objective assessment.

Perhaps the problem is that too many people take all his talk of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ at face value, and react on the basis of whether or not they would welcome such a prospect were it to come to fruition. Venezuelan reality is rather more prosaic; this guy is essentially a radical populist who has won mass support by spending oil wealth on social projects.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. For anybody on the left, the matter of whether petrodollars should best remain in the banks account of the comprador bourgeoisie or be spent on education and health outreach – Chavez’s so-called ‘misiones’ - is a no-brainer.

The life-and-death basic needs of the country’s indigenous and mestizo majority are rightly being prioritised over the additional luxury consumption of the Spanish-descended ruling class, many of whom have in truth very little about which to gripe.

Inevitably, some Marxist groups have chosen to flag this up the most significant radical developments anywhere on the planet since 1917; frankly, that smacks of desperation. None of what is going on oversteps the bounds of statist social democracy, a doctrine that has recently reformed the band and is about to embark on a worldwide comeback tour.

But insofar as Bolivarianism represents a concrete alternative to neoliberalism – and that on one of the continents worst afflicted by such an ailment – it has to be worthy of critical support.

So what do we make of the president winning a referendum removing the constitutional prescription on holders of that office serving more than two terms? The first point to make is that nobody can reasonably object to such a development per se. If four terms on the trot is good enough for FDR, it is good enough for anybody who can win the requisite number of fairly conducted elections.

Yes, Chavez did have to put the proposal to the vote twice before he got the right result. But that is no different in principle from the Irish government’s tactics on Maastricht and Lisbon.

The only intrinsically worrying point here is the indication that Chavez sees himself as indispensable to what the ostensible revolutionary process. If he had full confidence in the breadth of support for his project, he would feel confident enough to hand on the baton to a younger successor.

There is also the very real question of whether the undoubted social advances of the last decade or so can maintain momentum, now that oil has fallen by three-quarters from its peak price.

Detractors on the right and left alike point to the downside of life in Venezuela these days, including a surge in violent crime, the highest inflation rate in the Americas, the odd anti-semitic outburst, those embarrassing family album pictures of Hugo embracing sundry unsavoury tyrants, and a tendency to close down oppositional television stations.

These are all points I plan to return to in a future post. But my best guess is that right now, none of those crimes look too serious when seen from a Caracas shantytown. So long as Chavez enjoys outright majority electoral support, Chavismo has a mandate.

THE BLOODY attempt to massacre the Sri Lankan cricket squad in Lahore yesterday – most likely the work of Islamist grouping Lashkar-e-Toiba – sadly bears many of the hallmarks of the modern day terrorist spectacular.

Given the veneration of cricket throughout south Asia, a more high profile target is impossible to imagine. This action was purposely planned to maximise media impact. An apt comparison in the British context would be an assault on, say, Manchester United.

The squad was essentially a soft civilian target. I suppose a tenuous argument could be constructed that as a national side they somehow represent their state, in the way South African rugby stars were singled out by anti-apartheid protestors in the 1970s. But even if that case were to be established, that would be no reason to try to kill them.

Undeniably, there was a nasty sectarian religious undercurrent to what happened. I do not know the de facto religious affiliations of any of the players. But simple demographics suggests that in so far as they are devout at all, the majority of them will be Buddhist, Hindu or Christian. Their probable assailants were Muslim.

Finally, note the air of nihilism surrounding the affair. Strategic justification is hard to find. This was in by no means like chipping away at military infrastructure, or even blowing up a line of trainee policemen in order to discourage others from signing up.

Some reports suggest that the aim was to hold the cricketers hostage in exchange for jailed militants, which would at least explain why the gunfire was concentrated on Pakistani police.

Mainstream analysts postulate destabilisation of the weak civilian regime of Asif Ali Zardari as the most probable ultimate goal of yesterday’s outrage. That is not going to prove difficult at a time when a question mark remains over the very viability of Pakistan as an integral unit.

In a country where political, economic and military power is in the hands of a Sunni Muslim Punjabi elite that ruthlessly suppresses Baluchi and Pashtun insurgency, ethnic tension is always a given.

Until now, the Punjabis, whether ruling through civilian or military governments, have never been able to accommodate regional dissent. Moreover, the military – supported by the US and Nato, and perhaps the only real embodiment of the unity of the Pakistani state – has so far resisted decentralisation to the provincial level.

But only last month, the authorities signed a deal that effectively hands over the Swat Valley to the Taliban, after a campaign that saw non-combatants beheaded and 300 girls’ schools burned down. That the concession could be made at all is perhaps the surest indicator yet that Pakistan – a nuclear power, let us not forget - is rapidly unravelling.

Meanwhile, sections of the British left still insist that the ‘real reason’ Lashkar-e-Toiba visited mass bloodshed on Mumbai last November was ‘India’s increasingly prominent role as an ally of US imperialism across South Asia and beyond’.

Yet I have seen no evidence that the group operates on the basis of any particularly sophisticated understanding of international politics. India was an obvious target because of its brutal repression of Kashmir, and there is little point in complicating explanations further.

Besides that, to argue that a given group is engaged in a struggle against imperialism carries at least potentially the connotation that it is objectively progressive and therefore worthy of critical support. That is the last thing the serious left should be saying about the murderous reactionaries of Lashkar-e-Toiba.

MIKHAIL Gorbachev has been in town, and took time out yesterday to deliver a pep-talk to journos on the Evening Standard, now of course controlled by one of his Russian oligarch mates.

This at a time when the media is full of stories about the 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike; all we need now is word of a Duran Duran comeback and the 1980s retro vibe will be all but complete.

Gorby is, of course, ‘history’ in both the literal and current vernacular senses of the world. There must be young reporters and subs on the newspaper who were not even born when he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. I wonder what they made of the proceedings.

Those of us who were around at the time have widely differing opinions of the man and his work. Some on the left regard him as a good guy who tried to institute social democracy in a system that was otherwise basically OK; others excoriate him to this day as the man who single-handedly destroyed Actually Existing Socialism. Only a small minority among us chose not to play favourites among representatives of the Soviet ruling class.

On the other hand, Thatcher famously said that she liked him on a personal level, and saw him as a man with whom she could do business. I suspect most rightists privately consider him a dumb sucker who fell into all of the elephant traps set for him by Reagan.

At the distance of a mere single generation, it is probably impossible to be definitive. If I am still around, I will be interested to read the verdict delivered by the history ebooks of 2034.

Now pushing 80, Gorbachev is still talking up the merits of some kind of capitalism/socialism hybrid. Against the backdrop of the current economic situation, he told the assembled hacks:

“We need to find a new model of capitalism, taking the best of the old model and the best of socialism …”

He praised Gordon Brown, the prime minister, for taking “several really wise decisions” and said the opposition Conservatives had not given up on “Reaganomics”, the economic policies promoted by the former US president. “Maybe they would like to take the initiative but they are not ready for that.”

This is a line of political thinking with a long pedigree. Throughout much of the 20th century, reformist politicians of various hues in capitalist countries enacted measures to make capitalism ‘more fair‘. Likewise, communists - Lenin included, let us not forget - sought to use market mechanisms to help communism achieve greater economic efficiency.

Some of these historical experiments worked better than others. Social democracy resulted in some of the most humane societies ever created, while Stalinism culminated in some of the most execrable hellholes.

But the key point is that all of them failed. Over the last three decades of bourgeois triumphalism, received wisdom has been directed totally against the idea that some sort of fusion is even possible.

Many Marxists have reached the same conclusion, albeit from the opposite direction. As we know from reading Marx himself, capitalism is both inherently exploitative and inherently expansionary. Unless capitalist social relations can definitively be overcome, they will reassert themselves, with all of the inegalitarian and corrosive consequences that inevitably follow.

In a period when the idea of a crisis of capitalism is a patent reality and not just a Marxist theoretical construct, the proposal to split the difference between capitalism and socialism is bound to gain renewed popularity.

Nobody on the left should oppose any reforms that knock the rough edges off capitalism, although they tend to be expensive, and at a guess, few ruling classes will want willingly to implement them when they need every penny they have to bail out the banks. But ultimately, socialists should not forget that some differences really are too important to split in the first place.

PAKISTAN – a country that sporadically demonstrates the nominal trappings of democracy in its occasional interludes between dictatorships - has been in perpetual crisis since its foundation in 1947.

Endemically riven by ethnic strife between the dominant Punjabis and its other constituent nationalities, it has simply never cohered as a state, even on the basis of ostensible Islamic identity. What is more, it has shown no signs that it will ever be able to overcome this fatal in-built fault.

To understand Pakistani politics, it is necessary to look to the nature of the social formation. In the hope of increasing my knowledge of that topic, I am currently reading Christina Lamb’s 1990 book ‘Waiting for Allah: Benazir Bhutto and Pakistan’, which is an inevitably dated but still very readable account of the country’s post-independence history.

The context she provides highlights the current local difficulties experienced by the Ms Bhutto’s widowed husband. President Asif Ali Zardari. Zardari has been forced to reinstate chief justice Itikhar Chaudhry - suspended by Zardari's military strongman predecessor Pervez Musharraf - following a midnight meeting with army chiefs, the content of which we can guess only too well.

Indeed, he had already promised to do so, but reneged, fearing that the independently-minded Chaudhry will bring corruption charges against himself and his late wife. The climbdown significantly weakens his administration, which the west is keen to preserve as a key ally on the frontline of the global war on terrorism.

Admittedly, there has also been pressure from below, if the words ‘from below’ can rightly designate protests by lawyers, who have deployed their best quasi-Maoist rhetoric in staging a ‘long march’ in support of Chaudhry’s return.

Pakistan’s principle opposition leader and most wealthy businessman – an old school kleptocratic protégé of 1980s dictator Zia ul Haq, by the name of Nawaz Sharif – promises that today’s developments mark the start of ‘a revolution’.

We can be sure that the reality will be anything but that. Real power, as Lamb and other sources reiterate, is in the hands of the feudal ruling class, a social force to which all leading politicians are aligned and which none of them have an interest in opposing.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani state operates on the basis of what Lamb calls ‘superpatronage’. In so far as there are mass politics at all, the largely illiterate peasantry cannot understand ideological campaign pledges, even in the rare cases where they are made. Instead they happily sell their vote for a few rupees, or perhaps the promise of electrification or a road for their village. In the same fashion, MPs and ministers routinely switch sides, although naturally they come at a higher price.

Accordingly, distinctions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are rendered devoid of use. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party is formally affiliated to the Socialist International, but that does not make it a social democratic party in a meaningful sense. It is simply a vehicle for the Bhutto dynasty in its Macbeth-like quest for family vengeance against the Zia clique responsible for the execution of Ms Bhutto’s father.

Even though the country now has a sizeable working class and emergent far left current, it is difficult to perceive a social basis for a progressive outcome. The betting has to be that things can only get worse, bringing about a failed state with nukes on the border of Afghanistan. That is not a felicitous prospect.

AS THE last bastion of Stalinist kitsch, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is insistent that the purpose of its Sunday morning missile launch is simply to put into orbit a satellite that will broadcast revolutionary songs to earth.

Presumably the music will not be to the taste of the European ear. But anything that’s rock ‘n’ roll’s fine, as they say. And the experiment is understood to have failed, anyway. So is it worth getting worked up about a national vanity project of palpably Freudian aspect?

Well, yes. North Korea stands out among the remaining quintet of ostensibly communist states as the most execrable of the lot. It’s hardly rocket science to point out that a country that cannot feed its inhabitants has no business messing around with rocket science.

Shouldn’t all sane people be completely opposed to both its possession of nuclear warheads and its newly-found ability to go ballistic, then? Unfortunately, reductionist analyses of international politics leads far too many to muddleheaded stances on an issue that really isn’t that difficult to call; nuclear weapons, no matter who possesses them, are not a good idea.

On the left, the roots of this lack of clarity date back to the post-war period, when Communist Party members simultaneously managed to be among the best builders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and to equivocate on the demand for the disarmament in the USSR.

This is the line that subsequently became derided as the ‘workers’ bomb’ position; you could call its contemporary manifestation an ‘anti-imperialist bomb’ policy. For instance, Iran’s theocracy – which squares up to nuclear armed Israel – has a legitimate right to nuclear weapons in the name of self-defence, or at least it is sometimes argued.

On the right, there is parallel acceptance of the notion that nukes have kept the peace for the last 60 years. From there, it is a short step to the conclusion that the more countries that have them, the better. Indeed, serious rightist thinkers of the calibre of Kenneth Waltz openly make exactly that case.

Yet word that North Korea has one or two warheads, and will be able to rain them on Hockey Mom Central as soon as they can work out how to make a missile fly straight, hardly strikes one as making the planet a safer place.

The simple truth is, the more nuclear devices there are, the more likely it becomes that one will eventually go ‘bang’ by accident. And the more nuclear devices there are, the greater the risk will be that one will fall into the hands of those prepared to use them.

Obama’s Prague speech in favour of a world without weapons was hypocritical in the extreme, coming as it did from a man who has no intention of renouncing the power to kill everybody alive several times over, but the goal he enunciated is surely the right one. The left's starting point should be the call for all nuclear nations to disarm, not excluding their own country or their little ideological favourites.

Meanwhile, in should also be clear that the Pyongyang regime instantiates nothing of progressive content. To argue that its property relations are in some sense superior to capitalism, when what it has delivered is mass starvation, represents the reductio ad absurdum of any Marxist concept of socialist economics.

From the point of view of liberty, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has long stood revealed as a stinking police state; it’s hardly democratic, it isn’t interested in the well-being of its people, and it is an hereditary monarchy in all but name.

Its collapse and absorption by the South is the best thing that could possibly happen to the North Korean working class, and probably the best chance of denuclearisation to boot.

IT IS a little known fact that in the 1980s, Iceland boasted the largest section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International anywhere on the planet. At least measured by head of population, anyway.

Granted, Icelandic Mandelism only had 24 adherents. But that worked out at something like one person in 10,000, equivalent to a Trotskyist organisation of about 6,000 in Britain. By USec standards, that was the big time indeed.

Yet interesting factoids such as this aside, the reality is that the place has not widely been hailed for its political radicalism. Well known for many other things – Bjork, nuclear disarmament conferences, some pretty impressive geysers, drunken partying, world chess championship matches – it has in European political terms remained a relative backwater.

Until now, that is. Last year’s meltdown of the banking system, which claimed a number of British local authorities by way of collateral damage, has transformed the political climate.

For the first time in the country’s history, a leftist coalition including social democrats, socialists and greens is to take office, sweeping aside the nastily Thatcherite party that had been in office for 18 years.

The Left-Greens, which groups together socialists and environmentalists, got over 20% of the poll, only marginally behind the right, which turned in its worst-ever performance. Meanwhile, social democrat Johanna Sigurdardottir is to become the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister.

This is, in other words, a textbook example of how the global economic downturn could work to the left’s political advantage in country after country. So how is the new government planning to use its mandate?

The Guardian reports:

The leftwing coalition is assured of a three-seat majority and will need to embark on an austerity drive, swingeing spending cuts, and probably tax rises for the rich to try to rescue an economy that came crashing down last October when the three main banks collapsed and the country teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

OK, obviously the tax hike is cool with me, for reasons I intend to spell out in a post later this week. But otherwise the prognosis is tragic. Seemingly determined to uphold capitalism rather than break with it, the administration is set to institute the very policies that will alienate it from its popular support and guarantee the right a speedy return.

Unless the Guardian’s surmise is entirely wrong, a one in a lifetime opportunity to take the first steps towards the socialisation of a developed economy is about to be frittered away.

LISBON: I haven't visited the Portuguese capital since 1989, and had half expected to find it substantially tarted up, much in the same way that some parts of London have been transformed over the past two decades.

I needn't have worried. Lisbon is still recognisably its loveable scuzzball faded fascist self. Admittedly, the working girls have either been turfed off the main drag or are putting in rather later shifts, and there is now a visible homelessness problem reminiscent of the days of cardboard city under Thatcher. Otherwise, it's just the way I left it.

I was flicking through Diário de Notícias, the leading national newspaper, earlier this evening - which I can do, because I have halfway decent Spanish, and when you know Spanish, Portuguese gets thrown in free - and was struck by a piece on the op-ed page, in which a rightwing pundit pondered whether or not the extent of support for the far left is making the country 'ungovernable'. It's just the kind of talk I last heard in Britain in the 1970s.

Indeed, Portugal is probably the one country in the EU that swung noticeably to the left in the recent euroelections. The Trot/Hoxhaite Maoist lash-up Bloco de Esquerda secured 10.73%, making it the third-largest political force in the country, with three MEPs. Lead candidate Miguel Portas is talking in terms of participation in a future coalition government, rhetoric that will not thrill every revolutionary.

In addition, an alliance of the unreconstructed Stalinists in the Partido Comunista Portugués and the Greens picked up 10.66% and two MEPs. Collectively, the divided green/hard left/far left forces fared more than respectably against the Partido Socialista's 26.6%. However, a rightist bloc topped the table with 31.7%.

DN columnist João César das Neves warns - an extremist even by the standards of Catholic rightism, according to a Portuguese comrade in the comments box - that the result should not be extrapolated into predictions for the next general election. But shit, wouldn't it be nice to live in a country where the left gets one vote in five and the fascists are nowhere to be seen?

MUDDLEHEADED lack of clarity has unfortunately been a defining aspect of the commentary provided by the British left on events following the Iranian election. Whether this is motivated by reluctance to criticise a regime sometimes characterised as anti-imperialist, or generous subventions available for hosting programmes on Press TV, I am not sure.

Even where these factors are not obviously at work, generous resort to qualifying adjectives is certainly notable. Thus the election is described not as rigged but as ‘widely seen to be rigged’. Ahmadinejad is not confidently proclaimed the winner; instead it is noted that he ‘was declared the winner’. Protesters are described as ‘fearing the election had been rigged’.

A degree of prevarication is perhaps justified. Even Robert Fisk – who probably knows more about the Middle East than any other living Brit journo – has yet to pronounce definitively one way of the other. Let us therefore suspend disbelief and admit it is logically possible that - just maybe, however unlikely it looks - this was a fair fight and the incumbent won. That still leaves the left having to decide where its sympathies lie.

Now the problem becomes one of analytical framework. Read the standard leftist histories of the last century, and political explosions are always described in terms of class dynamics. The books detail the tactical debates had out within working class parties, or the reasons why capitalism financed the rise of Nazism.

When we discuss the October Revolution or the Bavarian Soviets or the Spanish civil war or the attempted coup in France in 1934, we know that in broad terms the workers lined up on one side and the bosses on the other.

These days, we prettify revolutions by naming them after colours and flowers and trees, precisely because that is no longer the case. What can possibly be deduced about the nature of uprisings routinely described as Cedar or Tulip or Rose?

It won’t be long before somebody comes up with equally dumb nomenclature for what is happening in Tehran this week. Yet the basic point to grasp is that the leadership of both camps are factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie.

Sections of the left regard Ahmadinejad as an implacable anti-imperialist with substantial support among the poor peasantry. That way, they can conveniently overlook both the brutal nature of the state he heads and the obvious analogy between the Ahmadinejad layer and the ruling class in the USSR prior to 1989.

If re-elected, the masterplan is to privatise state-owned holdings – especially the oil industry – for the private enrichment of a few hundred individuals.

Nor should Mousavi be mistaken for a liberal democrat. He was one of the props of theocracy in the 1980s, and instrumental in the murder of thousands of leftists. While he is promising an end to some of the more obvious discrimination against women, and a relaxation of state attempts to control private morality, his economic programme is essentially neoliberal.

Given the choice, socialists must extend solidarity– not to mention whatever concrete support they can possibly give – to the courageous young protestors on the streets today. If they are successful, they will open up a the space in which an independent labour movement and a genuine left can re-emerge in Iran.

But that is despite and not because of the class composition of their movement, and despite and not because of the policies of the man in whose name they march.

WHEN they counted the votes in the French presidential contest of 1851, it was plain that the incumbent had secured a landslide victory. Louis Napoleon - who clearly had never seriously contemplated relinquishing power after his earlier term in office - had the support of around 7.5m people, out of an electorate of just 8.0m.

Clearly, affirmation on that magnitude shows up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a lightweight in the ballot-rigging stakes. These things need to be done properly, or not at all.

Sections of the British left are obviously finding it difficult to orientate themselves to what is happening in Iran right now. But it seems to me that Marxists - well, those of them that actually have read some Marx, anyway - have an excellent ready-made guide to the political dynamics of a situation in which a rabble-rousing right-populist demagogue, basing himself on the poor peasantry and urban déclassé layers, manipulates an electoral process to secure continued political dominance.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is the work in which Marx comes up with one of his most frequently quoted aphorisms, namely the observation that when history repeats itself, it does so the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.

The events now unfolding on the streets of Tehran are anything but farcical, of course. But elements of the situation are palpably parallel to a process that has been repeated many times before. Although they have no excuse not to know the script by heart, much of the left is failing to get a handle on the situation.

Some ostensibly leftist MPs stress that Ahmadinejad has substantial backing from the rural poor, for instance. That is true, as far as we can tell. But as Marx notes, Napoleon III also enjoyed the support of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, if he did secure anything remotely like 7.5m votes, many workers must have voted for him. Yet rightly, Marx does not find this sufficient reason to extend political support to a reactionary.

Are the demonstrators CIA stooges, as some allege? Doubtless all the various wings of the US foreign policy establishment have analysed the situation and are exerting whatever influence they can to bring about a resolution favourable to Washington.

But for socialists, imperialist support for this or that faction of the Iranian bourgeoisie is both only to be expected and not decisive. Our opposition to Ahmadinejad does not mean we line up with Mousavi, either. We stand with those demanding democracy, both because we favour democracy over tyranny, and because of the space democracy opens up for the left.

I’m also bemused that some of those posting on leftwing blogs counter criticisms of Iran as ‘culturally universalist’, the basic idea here being that we in the imperialist heartlands have no right to disparage the actions of third world ruling classes, especially where they seem counterposed to the interests of our own ruling classes.

Like all projects located within a Hegelian problematic, Marxism is necessarily a culturally universalist doctrine par excellence. Its hugely ambitious aim is nothing less than to remake humanity completely, obliterating all distinctions of class or race or religion. We can argue about whether this is possible or desirable, or to what extent history is taking us there, but that is very clearly what it says on the can.

Marx’s journalistic writings on India, for instance, do not excuse suttee - the Hindu practice of burning widows to death on the funeral pyres of their late husbands - as somehow 'equally culturally valid' to giving an old biddy a decent pension.

So why should his followers be so intent on making excuses for Iran’s ‘semi-democracy’? There are impeccable Marxist grounds for suggesting that they should not be doing so.

UPDATE: Seems that Alan Woods of the International Marxist Tendency has beaten me to the title, which I did come up with independently. Great minds think alike, I guess.

THE exigencies of the day job preclude pontification today. Instead, I invite readers to hold forth with their opinions about developments in Iran. To get the conversation started, here's a sample what is being said on some other British (and Irish) leftie blogs:

AVPS

Shiraz Socialist

Socialist Unity proffers this little gem:

Within their ranks [the opposition] are undoubtedly many who see this as the opportunity to challenge the very foundations of the Islamic Republic, determined to end the political, social, and cultural restrictions which are part of daily life in Iran, ushering in a new system of government altogether.

Note how John Wight says this like it's a bad thing.

Splintered Sunrise

Stroppyblog [scroll down for Carnival of Socialism with Iran theme.]

The Daily (Maybe)

LONDON PROTEST TO DEMAND RELEASE OF JAILED IRANIAN TRADE UNIONISTS
Friday, 26 June 2009
12:30pm to 1.30pm
Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 16 Princes Gate, London SW7 1PT
(parallel to Kensington Road, not far from the Royal Albert Hall).

[via]

OBAMA has been widely criticised for his tardiness in openly backing the pro-Mousavi protests in Tehran, although on balance, STFU probably was the best course from a diplomatic point of view.

But as far as I know, not one Arab government has yet pronounced on the situation in Iran, either for or against. That strikes me as rather more interesting.

Remember that the Iranian regime plays a pivotal leadership role for shi’ite communities across the entire Middle East, not least in Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

In addition, it has been an article of Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy to back selected armed organisations irrespective of creed, including shia Hezbollah and sunni Hamas.

As a result, he enjoys a substantial level of backing in the Arab as well as the Persian Street. So while many regional governments resent Iranian intervention in what they regard as their internal affairs, they nevertheless need to stay in Ahmadinejad’s good books.

But what must make tyrannical monarchs and military strongmen even more cautious is the television pictures of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets.

Oppositional groupings such as the Muslim Brotherhood will be watching with extraordinary interest. After all, there ever were to be free elections in Egypt, for instance, there would be little doubt about the outcome.

As I argued in an earlier post, the western left should back neither Ahmadinejad nor Mousavi, but stand with the Tehran protestors, if only because they represent the best hope for greater democracy in Iran.

But I should just note that in politics, it is important to think your positions through. If democracy were to make gains in Iran - even of a partial character - the example might well prove contagious.

I suppose there is a sense in which the rule of a theocracy with popular backing is preferable to the rule of an air force commander without it. But neither option is anything socialists would particularly want to celebrate.

JUST before the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz famously insisted that US soldiers would be welcomed in with ‘chocolates and flowers’. The prediction didn’t pan out.

So it is ironic, then, that their withdrawal from the streets of the country’s major cities on Tuesday were indeed marked by flowers. Plastic flowers, to be precise.

As several press reports relate, fake blooms decorated Iraqi police and army vehicles participating in parades to note the occasion. Presumably this was unintentional and not some sort of backhanded reference to Mr Wolfowitz’s spectacularly misjudged prophesy.

Hours later, insurgents celebrated what the government of Nouri al Maliki has branded ‘national sovereignty day’ in their own special way. A car bomb at a food market in Kirkuk killed at least 33 people and wounded 90. It was the latest in a series of attacks that have claimed 300 lives since June 20.

The reality is that - protestations of ‘national sovereignty’ notwithstanding – Iraq remains a country under occupation. Less obvious occupation, less visible occupation, but occupation all the same.

Obama is committed to getting the troops out by 2011. But most serious observers believe that an extensive US military presence is inevitable for decades to come. Such are the realities of the aftermath of the invasion.

Whatever position one held six years ago – and I was one of the million or more Britons who took to the streets to oppose the war – the only sensible stance now is to wish for democracy and pluralism in Iraq.

That seems not only obviously preferable in principle to any variation on a dictatorial or theocratic theme, but also the best hope of providing the political space in which a genuine labour movement and socialist political organisations can find their feet.

The obvious question is whether or not the al Maliki government is a vehicle that can bring this outcome about. Those who argue to the contrary can surely marshal plenty of evidence in support of their case.

For instance, many Kurds fear that Baghdad will seek to rescind the semi-autonomy extended to the regions that they control, which include some of the country’s major oilfields.

Recent actions have given grounds to doubt that the shia-dominated administration can be trusted to act in a non-sectarian fashion towards Iraq’s sunni minority. There are also charges of corruption that must be answered.

Meanwhile, insurgents are likely to redouble their murderous efforts, if only to paint themselves as the real reason for the US pullback or in furtherance of a strategy of heightening confessional tension. An overtly authoritarian response may be just what they seek.

But while a long way from perfect on any measure, al Maliki increasingly looks like the least worst option from the singularly unappetising menu on offer.

Whether he heads a puppet government or not, I am not persuaded that blowing up dozens of Kurdish housewives doing the food shopping is in any way a military setback for imperialism.

IT IS as much a 60 million member social class as it is a political party in the western sense, and whatever self-description it attaches to its ideology, the label ‘communist’ does not strike most observers as a particularly apt or well-deserved.

Yet some kind of residual solidarity with the Communist Party of China somehow deludes a surprising number of British leftists into passive sympathy for whatever policies Beijing chooses to follow.

That much was evident in some of the coverage of the unrest in Tibet last year, and is likely to show itself again in the coming days, as the blogosphere gets to grips with the weekend riots in Urumqi, the worst violence seen in China since the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

Beijing’s claim that any tension in the region has been artificially got up by US-based separatist elements is obviously tenuous. Rebiya Kaheer has neither the popular clout nor the religiously-based standing of the Dalai Lama.

Both Tibetan and Uighur opposition to Chinese rule share common roots in cultural and religious persecution and discrimination, evidenced by the inferior treatment of these national minorities in terms of education, health and employment.

Meanwhile, the relative prosperity flowing from China’s turn to capitalism has not extended beyond the coastal provinces of the east; Xinjiang and Tibet are simply seen as useful sources of raw materials.

That point underlines that both countries are classic examples of internal colonies, right up to the point where they are considered suitable destinations for settlement by the surplus Han Chinese population.

Their case for self-determination is as clear as it is in Palestine, Western Sahara, Chechnya, Tamil Nadu or Kashmir.

National oppression on the scale seen in these two regions should be readily recognisable to anyone on the left, even if the national oppressors promote themselves as reds when the occasion demands.

AN ARMY careers office suddenly materialised alongside the likes of Sainsbury, Carphone Warehouse, Holland & Barrett, Burtons and Tchibo at Dalston Kingsland Shopping Centre a few months back.

The context seems slightly incongruous. Surely not many people head out to do the weekly shop on Saturday afternoon, stroll past the showroom and think to themselves ‘I know, I’ll sign up for a three-year tour of duty as a squaddie. Mum won’t half be surprised when I get home and tell her’.

Among the attractions used to lure punters in is a dummy rifle range, where children aged 14 or more can play with army firearms. Some local mothers think that this is not a great idea, given Hackney’s standing as a teenage guncrime hotspot.

But however much stress recruiters put on promises of travel, adventure and skills training, the reality is that the poor bloody infantry did not secure the nickname for nothing. Today we have confirmation that the death toll among British forces in Afghanistan has risen to 185.

The majority of those taking that final slow limousine ride through Wootton Bassett in Union Jack-draped coffins are – or rather, were - young working-class men.

Political debate over the conflict in recent weeks has centred on the adequacy of the equipment with which British servicemen and women are provided. It is indeed unconscionable that some of them are paying for their own boots and body armour.

But the more important question is what Britain is doing there at all. Both the Labour government – including defence minister Bob Ainsworth, apparently a contemporary of mine in the International Marxist Group – and the Conservative opposition stress their full support for the current occupation, with disagreements limited to the level of resources that should be provided.

Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg is making noises about the need for ‘a new strategy, and a new commitment to Afghanistan’, in what maybe a half-hearted play for the anti-war vote while desperately trying keeping pro-war opinion on board.

But none of our political leaders will face up to the real underlying issues. For a start, one obvious point to make is that Afghanistan gives every appearance of being unconquerable.

OK, I don’t have an MSc in War Studies from King’s College. But I do read history books. Three times between 1830 and 1919, Britain – the world’s leading military power for much of the period – tried to subjugate Afghanistan; three times it failed. I also read newspapers, so I know what happened to the powerful Red Army in the decade after 1979.

Nor is it easy to buy into Gordon Brown's claim that the war must be waged ‘to prevent terror coming to the streets of Britain’. The perpetrators of Islamist attacks on London and Glasgow hailed from Leeds and Aylesbury, not Kandahar or Mazar-e Sharif.

While it is true that under the Taliban, Afghanistan provided an operational base for Al Qa’eda, it is also true that Osama Bin Laden has many other strategic options. The west cannot occupy every failed state or province beyond government control in the Muslim world.

Finally, if the years since 2002 have taught us anything, it is that democracy cannot be exported any old country specially selected for the honour by a neoconservative think tank in Washington. There is no M1 Abrams road to political pluralism, human rights and economic stability.

The regime of Hamid Karzai is blatantly corrupt. What’s more, in a development that will confuse if not discomfit much of the so-called decent left, it is rather more pally with the theocrats in Tehran than the average Harry’s Place contributor would find desirable. See here for details [in French].

I did not support the original decision to participate in the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, and nothing that has happened in the intervening years to make me change my mind. But with every day the UK stays in the country, the case for pulling out becomes all the more clear.

SOMETHING struck my as rather odd about the letter the Independent chose to feature as the lead item on its online letters page today, and by that I don’t mean the argument that the writer was seeking to advance.

The idea that Iran qualifies as a democracy is frankly in the froot loop category, but some people do misguidedly hold it, and there is no reason that they should not express themselves in the public prints.

A certain Dr James Dickie maintains:

As a democracy Iran puts Britain to shame; during an eight-year war with Iraq, Iran held three elections, whereas during a five-year war with Germany, Britain didn't hold one.

Well, there are elections and there are elections, aren’t there? Any system in which unelected clerics decide in advance who can and who cannot stand as a candidate, and are able to dictate to the president what he may or may not do, hardly qualifies as a free polity.

Meanwhile, the Tudeh Party – once the largest communist party in the entire Middle East – remains officially banned, following a brutal purge in the 1980s in which many of its leaders were executed. Again, not democracy in my book.

But what really got me was the tone of the rant that followed:

In comparison with other Europeans, much less Iranians, we evince a gullibility that is yet another symptom of our national decline. Bereft of the healthy scepticism that once was a hallmark of the national character, we take our opinions on matters of foreign policy ready-made from a discredited political class and a press parasitic on that class.

Iran imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world. There are dozens behind bars right now, something that rather undermines Dr Dickie’s point.

Mendacious politicians who lied about weapons of mass destruction now pontificate about Iran to create a climate of fear like that which preceded the assault on Iraq and its execrable leader, whose usefulness to the West had by that stage been all used up. We are the victims of a consumerist culture that makes sure we swallow lies with the same voracity as we shorten our lives by munching Big Macs.

If I had been editing the Indie letters page, my gut instinct as an old hack would have been not to publish the missive, if only because of the way the logic jumps all too easily from the invasion of Iraq to the dangers of eating burgers. So I was intrigued enough to google up Dr Dickie, and came across this item in the Daily Mail:

Dr Yakub Zaki (born James Dickie in Greenock, but a convert to Islam) is deputy leader of the (non-elected) Muslim Parliament of Great Britain and says he would be 'very happy' if Downing Street was bombed and wouldn't 'care much' what happens to its 'inmates'.

Not an impeccably democratic point of view, one feels. But the clincher was this from Searchlight:

Born James Dickie, Yakob Zaki is a Muslim convert who works as an associate director of the pro-Iranian Muslim Institute, in which capacity he has contributed Holocaust denial articles to its publication Crescent International as well as the Tehran-based publication Kayhan. Addressing a rally of the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun in Wembley in April 1998 Zaki declared: “nobody was gassed to death in the concentration camps … David Irving has the right idea, destroy the Holocaust myth and you have destroyed Israel.”

Look, I’m a journo myself, and I am well aware that it is impossible for papers to check the identities of everyone who sends in a letter. I’m sure the Indie had no idea of Dr Dickie’s track record. Nevertheless, all the warning signs were there. Screwball alert! Screwball alert! Be a bit more careful next time, guys.

I HAVEN’T seen any leftist comment on the topic yet that hasn’t welcomed the Scottish Executive’s decision to free Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. Many of them were explicitly premised on the idea that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was innocent.

Megrahi’s defenders – not least my journalistic hero Paul Foot – have always maintained that the crime was actually the work of Syria-based terrorists acting as proxies for Iran. The argument is long and involved, and in so far as I have studied it, I find it convincing.

There is also an impeccable liberal case that the move is accordant with Scottish law as it stands; compassionate release is available to prisoners within three months of death, irrespective of the offences they are said to have committed, and irrespective of guilt.

Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was undoubtedly right to come to the conclusion to which he came. So I take it as read that much of the mock outrage emanating from the right is as feigned as it is misplaced.

Don’t give credence to Tory proclamations of moral rectitude in dealings with the Arab world until David Cameron commits to releasing full details of Mark Thatcher’s involvement in British Aerospace’s al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia in the 1980s.

But if this post was to restrict itself to agreeing with just about everybody else in my part of the political spectrum, it would have very little point.

The left needs to consider the real reason why Megrahi was returned to Tripoli. What it especially needs to grasp – and I don’t think it has done yet - is that what happened is absolutely and explicitly not any kind of climbdown, or even as much as a tacit admission that he was framed. Nor is it a demonstrable instance of determined adherence to the principles of justice, regardless of US outrage.

We do know that the release was preceded by a number of meetings between prime minister Gordon Brown and business secretary Peter Mandelson and high ranking figures in the Libyan dictatorship.

Brown admits that he discussed the matter when he bumped into Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi at the G8 summit in Italy six weeks ago, while Mandy recently talked things over with Gaddafi’s son Saif at Lord Rothschild’s villa in Corfu.

It also seems that – contrary to official insistence that the Scottish Executive was acting entirely of its own accord – the British government did bring pressure for Megrahi’s release to bear on Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, both Gaddafi and Saif have claimed that Megrahi’s freedom is explicit payback for some kind of business deal, presumably in the best interests of BP and Shell, who are both involved in oil and gas projects in the country possessed of the largest proven oil reserves in Africa.

Neither is a witness of the highest calibre, shall we say. But just because the Libyan strongman and his boy say something is true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

In sum, we are faced with a straightforward case of New Labour setting aside any other consideration than what works for major UK companies, building its foreign policy in that light alone, and then passing the buck north of the border. That - this once - its actions were consonant with the correct course is simply felicitous coincidence.

SLAVOJ Žižek seems to be taking over from the ageing Noam Chomsky as intellectual superhero of choice for the more academically-inclined sections of the far left.

The fact that he got top billing on the extensive fly posting undertaken for the recent Marxism 2009 conference, organised by the Socialist Workers’ Party, is surely illustrative of the almost exclusively postgrad student audience that organisation seems to crave right now.

Force the average office drone or angry NEET to hazard a guess, and a goodly proportion would probably tell you is was a midfielder for Newcastle United.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not coming on all crudely workerist and I’m not belittling the intellectual endeavour involved in using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualise German Idealism. Gosh, I wouldn't do that, even if I knew what it meant.

I’m merely suggesting that union reps looking for a smartarse one-liner for use against HR next time they take a personal case may be better served looking elsewhere.

I digress. Žižek has attracted plenty of flack of late for an article – carried in a number of other outlets – in which he accused the state of Israel of seeking to make Palestinian territory ‘Palestinian-frei’. The neologism can only have been purposely intended to invoke the official Third Reich term Judenfrei, applied to an area from which all Jews had been removed.

That is how the piece initially appeared on Comment is Free, anyway. Two days later, the print edition of the Guardian redacted the phrase to the less emotive ‘Palestinian-free’. Retrospectively, the website was similarly altered:

The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-free, and that we must accept the fact.

Some feel that our sophisticated philosopher is here crudely equating Israel with Nazi Germany, in the same manner as the Star of David = swastika stickers produced by some Islamist organisations. I am going to argue that Žižek stays on the right side of the line, if only just.

Israel, of course, disposes of an extensive ‘my mother, drunk or sober’ fan club, for whom any suggestion that Israeli conduct is ever anything than impeccable is tantamount to virulent anti-semitism.

Thus they defend Israel’s documented resort to extrajudicial killing and administrative detention, and fiercely deny that the IDF incursion into Gaza was anything other than an entirely proportionate response to rocket attacks on Sderot.

To take such stances is obviously to deny reality, and evinces a light-minded selectivity inconsistent with genuine belief in human rights, which has either to be universal or not at all.

Moreover, it is perfectly intellectually consonant broadly to support any given state while being critical – even sharply critical – of its internal or external policies.

Serious debate demands that it is admissible to mount polemic directed against Israel, and aiming childish chants of ‘anti-semitic! anti-semitic!’ against everyone who does so is by now a well-worn and thus patently see-through tactic.

Exaggeration is widely recognised as a legitimate polemical device. Only yesterday, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling compared gang crime in inner Manchester to Baltimore. This was surely intended as a persuasive trope rather than a truth claim.

The meat of the charge against Žižek is that he has resorted to implicit Nazi analogy. For anybody in possession of even elementary historical literacy, that is something that can never be done lightly. Moreover, he faces earlier accusations of anti-semitism, even overt fascist sympathies.

Then again, there are elements of Israel’s coalition government that would undoubtedly like see a Palestinian-free West Bank, and have openly called for mass murder to advance ultranationalist political ends.

Reputable newspaper Ha'aretz claimed in 2003 that Avigdor Lieberman – now foreign minister – demanded that thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel be drowned in the Dead Sea.

There are also reports that he has demanded that 90% of Arabs be expelled from Israel, maintaining: ‘They have no place here. They can take their bundles and get lost.’ I have not been able to source the widely-used quote, although by the same token, I am unaware of any denials.

Just talk, you say? Well, yes. Lieberman fortunately remains in no position to instantiate what he obviously desires. But this is a mentality seen before in history.

Likewise, Žižek's remark is 'just talk'. His jibe is certainly contentious, maybe unpleasant and perhaps unjustified. But it remains a jibe, and cannot be read as the meaningful identification of Israel with Nazi Germany.

In any case, with Mr Lieberman on board, Israel’s more sensitive friends are in no position to feign outrage over a loose formulation from a loose cannon philosophy prof.

THE current edition of Weekly Worker - seemingly the least popular but yet most widely-read publication on the British far left - includes a 2,000 word review of two recent books on Iran, penned by yours truly.

The works in question are Ervand Abrahamian’s 'A history of Modern Iran' (Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp224, £14.99), and Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Mahjoob Zweiri’s 'Iran and the Rise of its Neoconservatives' (IB Tauris, 2007, pp215, £20).

As well as assessing the content of the volumes named above, I also discuss some of the characterisations of Iran advanced by British leftwing groups. Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers' Party has reportedly concluded that the Tehran regime is somehow Thermidorean, while the Alliance for Workers' Liberty considers it to exemplify clerical-fascism.

I'm not convinced that either position helps us understand bourgeois theocracy sui generis; read why here. Feedback in the comments box, please.

YEVEGENY Dzhugashvili – grandson of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Joseph Stalin - has issued a £200,000 libel writ against liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, arguing that their coverage of his illustrious forebear traduces the family’s good name.

""Half a century of lies have been poured over Stalin's reputation and he cannot defend himself from the grave, so this case is essential to put the record straight," Mr Dzhugashvili's lawyer, Leonid Zhura, told Reuters.

Mr Zhura's client is apparently especially angry about suggestions that the late dictator ordered the murder of Soviet citizens.

Any suggestions for libel actions with less chance of success? Choose any historical figure.

AS DOWN and dirty feats of cynical realpolitik go, it won’t rank in the history books with Nixon’s rapprochement with China, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, or Bismarck’s secret treaties.

If Labour really did broker a deal that saw the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi in return for Libyan oil concessions – and that’s what the circumstantial evidence suggests – then it is yet another example of diplomatie quotidienne, as engaged in by all governments all the time.

So instead of some of the spluttering broadcast interviews to which we have been treated to over the last fortnight, many delivered in tones of voice from which an averagely-gifted poker player could instantly detect a bluff, ministers should have offered a two-word defence: ‘Yeah. And?’

‘Look, the bloke’s about to croak anyway, and there’s serious doubt he done the crime, so freeing him was the compassionate thing to do. And what would be the point of letting the geezer die in jail, when he can be used as a bargaining chip to give BP the heads up with Brother Gadaffi?

‘Every British government cuts deals with dodgy Middle Eastern regimes in the interests of British multinationals. It’s yer national interest, innit. Cameron can STFU, or we release the files on what the boy Thatcher got up to on behalf of BAe in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. Hear me, Tories?

‘Don’t give me that “never negotiate with terrorists” bollocks, either. Britain has negotiated with every serious terrorist group that has emerged since the war, from the Stern Gang to EOKA to the IRA. And if it pisses off the Yanks, tough; they owe us one after Afghanistan and Iraq.’

Don’t get me wrong; as a socialist, I wholeheartedly wish that New Labour did not make the interests of business the sole yardstick when decided almost every issue of policy, domestic or foreign.

But given that it does, couldn’t they at least be unapologetic? They should take a leaf from the Kissinger notebooks and stop being such big girl's blouses about it all. I guarantee you that the story would be dead by now.

CAN any rational humanist really want to cheerlead either the guys that throw acid in schoolgirls’ faces, or the men who killed dozens of Afghan civilians in an airstrike on two stolen fuel tankers last week? What I'm going to argue below is that such a choice represents a false counterposition for the left.

Following debates on this blog and over at Harry’s Place earlier this week, I intend to set out a third stance on the Afghanistan war, appealing to the arguments of both mainstream moral philosophy and the Marxist tradition.

Quite simply, if socialists offer nothing in advance of vicarious backing for large scale murder on either side, than our politics are pretty much redundant anyway. And irrespective of where one starts on the left-right spectrum, negotiated withdrawal and the advent of coalition government - inevitably including at least sections of the Taliban - is increasingly looking like the only reality-based prognosis.

Let's start by asking what is wrong with straightforward pacifism in this instance. Pacifism as a concept has obvious attractions for the left; it is honourable, internally coherent, and boasts a long tradition. It is, for example, an organic component of British Labourism. The majority of leftists would uphold a right to conscientious objection.

It is hard to imagine even the most rabid inhabitants of the Harry’s Place comments box would wade into a sincere Quaker opponent of the Afghanistan conflict with the same venom they apply to anyone else against the bloodshed.

I’ll even admit that my disquiet is semi-pacifist or perhaps three-quarters pacifist in inspiration. It would take a lot to make me support any war. War is always a bad thing. I do not believe this particular conflict should have be launched in the first place.

But I can envisage circumstances in which I would be prepared to take up arms. Moreover, we are faced here with an actual war situation, which leaves in inapplicable now battle has commenced. So pure pacifism ultimately fails.

There is another principles-based argument to be had from state sovereignty, and versions are sometimes advanced from those influenced by Stalinism. International law dictates that countries are not entitled to invade other countries, no matter how onerous the government, and most of the left will regard this heuristic as useful.

But again this cannot be decisive; any step that would have prevented the Rwanda genocide would surely have been morally correct, as would anything that could have stopped the slaughter in Darfur.

The main philosophical basis adopted by the pro-war left is so-called just war theory. The thought here is that there is a checklist of criteria for 'just war', and that Afghanistan ticked all the boxes.

Was the war lawfully declared by lawful authority? Were all other means of resolving tensions attempted first? Are the means employed proportionate? How good are the chances of success? The answers to these and similar questions will ultimately come down to opinion.

If I remember correctly, Blair explicitly invoked this doctrine by way of support for British participation in Afghanistan. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? It is ultimately rooted in the Catholicism of St Augustine, so the secular left has good reason to be wary of the underlying metaphysic.

More importantly, the pro-war left is inconsistent in its application. Why no strident calls military intervention in Burma? If the right of women to go unveiled merits regime change in Afghanistan, why didn’t the US topple the House of Saud decades ago?

Given the welter of conflicting principles on offer, the majority of the left prefers to base morality on weighing up the consequences of major political choices. Accordingly, the pro-war left has frequently invoked the introduction of liberal democracy to Afghanistan as reason to line up behind the war drive.

And the introduction of liberal democracy to Afghanistan would undoubtedly be a good thing. But if it ever does come, it will not come courtesy of the US military. We might want to call the idea that liberal democracy can be imposed by force of arms the Fukuyama Fallacy. It has been put to the test, and found wanting, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

With perhaps the sole historical - but nevertheless partial - exception of Japan, democracy has always arisen either organically or not at all. Few partisans of the October 2001 attack can look upon the putrid and corrupt vote-rigging government in Kabul with any sense of satisfaction.

What of outcomes less than full-blown democracy? Clearly, the invasion of Afghanistan and continuance of Taliban rule were two separate options. If option (a) leads to 100,000 deaths, and option (b) to 100,001 deaths, or even 500,000 deaths - to take numbers at random - than literal utilitarian calculation leads us to prefer option (a). But we cannot establish in advance which of the two choices is in fact option (a). What is more, there are other criteria that must come into play.

I locate my politics in the Marxist tradition, which makes the emancipation of the working class, on a global scale, the central concern. My objection to the ‘victory to the Taliban’ slogan put forward by sections of the far left is that I do not see how the Taliban’s victory advances the interests of ordinary working people.

The contention that it does is frequently made in terms of ‘anti-imperialism’, and this is undeniably pertinent. If imperialism is being used here as a synonym for the global capitalist system, than socialists naturally want to see it weakened.

But there is a separate debate to be had about exactly what ‘imperialism’ constitutes today, and how the definition differs from the one advanced by Lenin. The US is not in Afghanistan to exploit the consumer market, and it is difficult to maintain that such raw materials as the country does offer make direct occupation worthwhile.

And if it is a simple 'setback for imperialism' you want, there is still no reason to wave pom-poms for Afghanistan’s indigenous reactionary right. Negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan will, in and of itself, represent a humiliating blow to US global hegemony.

Comparison is sometimes made between the Taliban and the FLN in Algeria or the NLF in Vietnam. The 1950s and 1960s left strongly solidarised with such forces. Should we not, by way of analogy, do the same for the Taliban?

No. While neither of these organisation qualified as exemplary democrats, they could broadly be classified as national liberation movements that were progressive in their historical context, especially in comparison to French colonialism or US military occupation.

The Taliban cannot be seen in similar light. Stories of the atrocities they perpetrate are of course exaggerated, but cannot be discounted. No humanist can easily countenance the triumph of forces that wilfully proclaim a project of implementing misogynist theocratic barbarism.

I can well anticipate the response the preceding paragraph will generate. I will inevitably be compared to the racist imperialists of the nineteenth century, who maintained that the British Empire was God’s way of civilising the Dark Continent. But that would be sheer misrepresentation. I do not for a minute doubt the Taliban’s intelligence, sophistication, or capacity for governance; on the contrary, these are precisely what I fear.

To chant 'victory to the Taliban' is a de facto call for the bloody repression of the Afghan working class and women's movement. Factor in the boost for reactionary Islamism - not least the central Asia domino effect - and the deficiencies of this slogan should be obvious to anyone possessed of elementary political sanity.

For Marxists and non-Marxists alike, consequentialist morality dictates that we take a hard look at the possibilities on offer in Afghanistan right now. Is the desire for western military victory anything more than wishful thinking? I talk to both former and serving military personnel in the course of my job as a journalist. Few of them have much confidence in ultimate success.

The realistic alternatives are decades of attrition or a negotiated pullout in favour of coalition government. We have been here many times before; that’s what former IRA leaders are doing in Stormont. The trick will be to split the Taliban and get the more moderate elements - if that’s the right word - round the negotiating table, and strike a deal with other local forces that will constrain their influence. But there are plenty of precedents.

Maybe - just maybe - a deal can be reached that will leave open the space in which an organised labour movement, feminists and a political left can begin to emerge. For socialists, that is no small concern. We certainly have no business advocating any political line that does not at least potentially open such doors.

But the whole situation is one in which there is no ideal outcome, and withdrawal will not bring peace. One way or another, the violence will continue. The trouble is, Afghanistan is now so badly broken that it is difficult to see what could possibly fix it.

In the interests of rational debate, I'd be happy to post reasoned responses to the above on this blog.

SOFT Sinophilia has emerged as a default position for certain parts of the British left. Some, it seems, truly cannot tell the difference between socialism in one country and anti-socialism in one vast extended cheap labour camp operated for the benefit of global capital; others should know better.

Yesterday, Hu Jintao took to the rostrum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, standing on the very spot from which Mao Zedong had announced the birth of the People’s Republic of China, 60 years ago to the very day.

You can read a slightly breathless account of what happened next in the Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain, which enthusiastically recounts president Hu's heartfelt commitment to ‘work with the people of all countries to build a world of peace and common prosperity’.

Most Marxists would want to ask some questions here. Which ‘people’, exactly? Whose prosperity? Liberals, or indeed anyone with the faculty for independent thought, will be wondering whether this goodwill to all men shtick applies to Tibet or Xinjiang.

Oh, and the location. Tiananmen Square. While we are busy celebrating anniversaries, didn’t something happen there, some two decades ago this year? Go on, remind me again. But hey, I’m keeping you from savouring the Morning Star’s story to the full:

Mr Hu vowed that Beijing would stick to "an independent foreign policy of peace to promote lasting peace and common prosperity of the world."

Sporting a Mao suit, the Chinese premier stood in an open-top Red Flag limousine to review military formations which involved nearly 200,000 People's Liberation Army servicemen and women, civilians, dozens of fighter jets and hundreds of tanks, artillery and lorries carrying long-range, nuclear-capable missiles.

The juxtaposition of imagery here is quite exquisite, no? That sounds like an awful lot of hardware for a country solely intent on an ‘independent foreign policy of peace to promote lasting peace’. The many Taiwanese people who favour independence will have little doubt about to whom Beijing was aiming the martial display.

But perhaps I am being too cynical. Over at the blog Socialist Unity, Respect activist Andy Newman has got a message for the knockers:

It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress.

The trouble with that argument is that China’s growth is palpably not generating either social justice or progress. Both Morning Star readers and Andy may be aware of the concept of the rate of exploitation, a notion developed by a little-known German political economist in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the closest equivalent metric in mainstream economics is the overall wages bill for a given country, expressed as a proportion of gross domestic product. This is, crudely, the workers’ share of the social product. Even despite the onslaught of neoliberalism, it typically amounts to around 55% throughout western Europe.

But a recent study by Chang Xiuze, an economist with a National Development and Reform Commission think tank, revealed that the salary component of China's GDP dropped from 17% in 1980 to just 11% in 2007. In other words, the bosses are taking a dramatically greater cut.

The social impact is readily apparent, and can be measured by the so-called Gini coefficient, an objective measure of income inequality. On this yardstick, a score of zero implies income is shared equally between all individuals, while a coefficient of one would mean one person within the population had all the income and everyone else had none. The higher the Gini coefficient, the higher the level of inequality.

In Britain, the net effect of Thatcherism followed by New Labourism has seen the Gini coefficient reach 0.36; in China, it has now topped 0.47, making it a society fractionally more inegalitarian than the US, itself one of the most unequal places on earth.

Marxist accounts of China have long been underpinned by conflicting theoretical frameworks. But those debates are now of historical interest only. Whatever China once represented, there is nothing about an authoritarian nationalist sweatshop for which anyone on the left should rationally seek to cheerlead.

THE bomb went off in Brighton, just before three o’clock in the morning; the radio alarm went off in some student digs in Leytonstone, only four hours and a few minutes later.

I was still half awake, perhaps reflecting on that day’s lectures, or maybe panicking about some unfinished essay or simply thinking about cleaning my teeth. But I still recall the shock I felt that day in October 1984, as they newsreader described what had happened at the Grand Hotel while I had been sleeping.

Nobody had yet claimed responsibility. But whoever the perpetrator, it was clear that somebody had tried to wipe out a sizeable proportion of the Conservative Party with a massive improvised explosive device. Ultimately, five people died and 34 were injured, some of them crippled for life.

No rule of thumb singles out which politicians fall to the assassin’s bullet or the madman’s frenzied knife attack. It has happened to Lincoln, Ghandi, Kennedy, Allende and Palme, and it has happened to Dollfuss and Sadat and numerous minor league caudillos and miscellaneous military strongmen. Good guys, bad guys, right, left and centre.

But attempts to slaughter entire governments at one stroke at rare indeed. I’m sure there must be other historical examples, but none come instantly to mind as I write this post.

Remember, too, the social context. We were in the middle of the miners’ strike. The phrase ‘period of heightened class tensions’ was a simple description of reality, and not just a Marxist textbook cliché. Had the attack reached its intended targets, the declaration of a state of emergency, perhaps even outright military rule, would have been at least a possibility.

The next day, the Irish Republican Army owned up:

Mrs Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.

Twenty five years ago, I was a member of a small Trotskyist organisation, operating on the premiss that its actions were somehow laying the groundwork for smashing the British state. In retrospect, it is difficult to see how selling a few thousand papers every fortnight while popping up sporadically to propose sweeping resolutions at Labour Party general management committee meetings were supposed to attain that end.

But that is how people like current defence secretary Bob Ainsworth, right wing SNP journalist George Kerevan, and I – all associated with the International Marxist Group in the early 1980s – thought at the time.

We also offered ‘critical but unconditional support for the IRA’ and its ‘armed struggle’, on the argument that ‘Ireland’s permanent revolution’ would spark a ‘crisis of the British state’ and so aid the working class seizure of power. This attitude had a resonance with some sections of the Labour left.

Certain rival Trot outfits were straightforward cheerleaders for Irish republicanism, and put a positive case that the IRA’s chief failing was if anything a certain lack of resolution in not making its military campaign yet more effective.

The IMG equivocated, as we did on every other act of terrorism that claimed civilian lives. You have to understand that the root of the problem is the British military presence on the island of Ireland, we would say. The Irish people have the right to armed resistance, and on the mainland too, if they deem that necessary. And what about Bloody Sunday, eh? What about Bloody Sunday, comrade?

Would I feel like that now? Would Ainsworth or Kerevan? My former comrades can speak for themselves. For me, the distance accorded by a third of the average lifetime is enough to put the matter in perspective. Humanism arrives to temper the abstractions.

Senior figures in the IRA then are senior figures in the Northern Ireland Executive today. Was the Brighton bombing necessary to achieve that? Nationalist diehards argue that Adams and McGuiness are sell-out merchants who have got where they are on account of the Armalite as much as the ballot box.

But a united Ireland does seem likely at some point in the next few decades. The contemporary parallel is obvious; one day the foreign troops will withdraw from Iraq. I suspect that in 2030, the idea that 7/7 was justified by Britain’s military presence in that country will show itself just as superseded by subsequent events, although this will not now be intuitive to those younger people who currently adhere to such a stance.

Meanwhile, survivors of the blast, led by Norman Tebbit, met at the scene of the explosion yesterday to unveil a plaque in memory of the victims. Although I could not have imagined myself saying this in 1984, Tebbit obviously now has the moral high ground.

Patrick Magee, who planted the bomb, was released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement, and today spoke at a meeting in the House of Commons, hosted by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues, chaired by a Tory MP. Tebbit, whose wife has been bedridden since the bombing, is reportedly furious.

All of us said what we said then, because we believed what we believed then, and because the circumstances were what the circumstances were then. The convenient form of words everyone uses to brush any unpleasantness under the carpet is that ‘people have moved on’, and yes, moving on means never having to say you are sorry. But some of us now have no logical choice but to admit we were ultimately in the wrong.

HELPFUL hints for Afghani vote riggers; next time you stuff a ballot box, guys, make sure you include a few token votes for other candidates. When Karzai picks up every single vote in village after village, people tend to get a tad suspicious.

I mean, not even Georgina Gould’s New Labour supporters in Erith & Thamesmead Constituency Labour Party do things quite as crudely as you lot. Perhaps the council could arrange to twin with Kabul Central?

Investigations into the recent presidential contest in Afghanistan have been undertaken by both the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission and the locally-sponsored Independent Electoral Commission. But given that in some districts, turnouts exceeded 100%, the formal findings are neither here nor there.

Nobody who has so much as skim read the press coverage can entertain the slightest illusion that the exercise was in any way credible. Right now a re-run between incumbent Hamid Karzai and Dr Abdullah Abdullah, his closest challenger, seems likely.

But this will take months to organise, and in the meantime, the already dangerous ethnic cleavage between Tajiks in the north and Pushtuns in the south is likely to be exacerbated further.

Karzai ostensibly secured the support of 54.5% of the electorate last time round in 2004. And hey, 54.5% is as good a guess as any, I suppose.

This is a country for which no accurate census data, and thus no meaningful electoral register, exists. Moreover, large sections of the population live in areas controlled by the neo-medieval reactionaries of the Taliban, who are none too keen on such decadent Jewish-crusader-imperialist innovations as man-made governments that let women vote.

Eight years after the NATO invasion, these developments will be unwelcome news for those who conjured up visions of the desirability and possibility that democracy could become an export commodity. Widespread allegations of corruption have always surrounded the West’s placeman, but the recent high jinks put the matter beyond question.

The legitimacy of the occupation will be further undermined in the eyes of first world public opinion. For Barack Obama, it will be that much harder to authorise the 40,000 reinforcements requested by General Stanley McChrystal.

Like most people on the left, I did not think British troops should have joined the US in taking over Afghanistan in the first place. But with each day that UK forces remain in the country, the case for pulling out becomes ever clearer.

While it is true that under the Taliban, Afghanistan provided an operational base for Al Qa’eda, Osama Bin Laden retains many other strategic options. The west cannot occupy every failed state or every province beyond government control in the Muslim world.

Nor is it easy to accept Gordon Brown's claim that the war must be waged ‘to prevent terror coming to the streets of Britain’. The perpetrators of Islamist attacks on London and Glasgow hailed from Leeds and Aylesbury, not Kandahar or Mazar-e Sharif.

I am under no illusions that withdrawal would bring peace. One way or another, the violence will continue. The trouble is, Afghanistan is so badly broken that it is difficult to see what could possibly fix it.

RARELY can the standard neo-Malthusian rightwing orthodoxy on development have been expressed quite as bluntly – or quite as nastily, come to that - as it is in The Times this morning. ‘Do starving Africans a favour,’ runs the headline over a piece by the paper’s former Africa bureau chief Sam Kiley. ‘Don’t feed them.’

Well, they do say the first rule of good journalism is to cut to the chase, and Kiley certainly does that:

The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.

There follows a spot of quibbling over the statistics. The compassion industry routinely ramps up the disaster stats on its press releases, the better to gull the guilt trippable into emptying their wallets. That 23m figure is ‘humbug’, he argues. Nobody is in a position to count.

OK, let’s go with the flow and accept that this is a sweeping overestimate on the part of malicious donation-craving charity bureaucrats. But it is rather noticeable that Kiley does not hazard his own guess as to the numbers involved.

What does he think the starvation tally is, then? Even if only, say, 2.3m of our fellow human beings face death from lack of food, many wussy westerners say maintain that just maybe there is a moral case for sending them some, rather than burning it so as to keep US and EU farmers in 4x4s.

But even if 23 million people do face starvation, please don’t reach for your cheque book. Foreign aid is the principal reason for Africa’s accumulated agony … If we send help now, we’ll be killing more people later because more people will be bred and no one will think to save any crops to feed them.

So let the bastards die, then. The argument here is that not saving a million lives in the here and now potentially saves three million or five million lives a decade from now. There are a number of obvious ethical problems with such calculations, not least those involved in balancing the value of an existing human being against the value of a nominal human being not yet in existence. The point does not seem to me to stack up.

Now comes Kiley’s punchline. I simplify only slightly if I tell you that his entire argument boils down to the contention that the stupid niggers need to get their political act together.

Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought were it not for government corruption and ethnic violence. Ethiopia and Eritrea squander the cash that could be used for economic development on fighting sporadic wars.

This will be achieved, Kiley contends, when educated Africans get rid of the dictators and – although this is implicit rather than explicit in the text – bring about development by free market norms.

But Africans have been educated at university level for decades now, with many studying at the world’s elite institutions. They have tended to find that a masters’ degree does little good against a machete, and that even a Harvard PhD is no match for a Kalashnikov. Accordingly, most have found it more expedient to get the hell out and get a job as a doctor in Europe instead.

Free market reforms have frequently been imposed by the Bretton Woods agencies, in the shape of what were once known as Structural Adjustment Programmes and now go by some innocuous euphemism. But the Washington Consensus clearly has not worked.

There is a rational kernel in the idea that corrupt governments recycle much of the available aid on vanity Cathedral construction projects and the upkeep of multiple leggy blonde mistresses dans les arrondissements les plus chic de Paris, even as their heavies kill and rape to rip off their country’s mineral resources. I’d like to see the left stress this rather more than perhaps it historically has done.

But the point that the left should make to the right is that the very worst regimes are essentially those licensed by Washington and the former colonial powers. Yes, famine will only end when the military strongmen swept away. But only the social forces to which the left is aligned are going to be able to achieve that.

THE trial started yesterday, but somehow Radovan Karadzic doesn’t fancy standing in the dock before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and is boycotting the proceedings.

Little wonder. The former Bosnian Serb leader faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. The most serious of them are the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, and the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo that resulted in more than 10,000 deaths.

Nor is there any serious question as to his guilt. Karadzic put his name to the now infamous de facto mass death warrant by the innocuous name of Directive 7, a document which explicitly commissions mass murder.

Comparisons to Hitler – advanced by Clinton era diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the main architect of the Dayton Accords – are ludicrously overblown, of course. But Karadzic’s crimes surely rank alongside those of such famous paper-shuffling predecessors such as Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann may have killed one Jew directly with his own hands, although the defence team in his 1961 trial before an Israeli disputed even that. But his culpability in the holocaust – an event that not even Nick Griffin has a conviction for denying - was not in any doubt, even if all he did was sign off the orders.

Yet controversialists from a range of political standpoints, from the hardline nationalist right to sections of the Stalinist-influenced or anti-imperialist left, have rushed to Karadzic’s defence.

The ICTY represents the purest form of victor’s justice, we are told. Its indictees are disproportionately Serbian or Montenegrin. Posthumous charges tabled against the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović were token gestures designed to give the court a semblance of neutrality.

The action against of Karadzic is simply a face-saving exercise after the four-year trial of Slobodan Milošević ended suddenly, when the accused died of a heart attack in 2006 with the verdict still pending, they maintain. Karadzic is guilty largely of being on the losing side after an especially vicious civil war, and in any case, was guaranteed immunity from prosecution under the terms of Dayton.

Expect legalistic quibbles, too. ICTY was established by the UN Security Council rather of the UN General Assembly. The contention that the court therefore has no legal authority was central to Milošević’s case.

None of this is particularly convincing. Many similar points could have been raised in relation to Eichmann. Israel had no right to abduct him from sovereign Argentina, and probably it would have been preferable for him to be tried in a neutral jurisdiction.

Maybe clemency could have been exercised and the death penalty commuted to life imprisonment. But it would be difficult to insist that what happened to the Nazi was in any real sense a miscarriage of justice.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian this morning, George Monbiot describes former prime minister Tony Blair as ‘one of the two greatest living mass murderers on earth’, because he committed British armed forces to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair was well aware, Monbiot believes, that this was an illegal war:

Blair knew that the decision to attack Iraq had already been made; that it preceded the justification, which was being retrofitted to an act of aggression; that the only legal reasons for an attack didn't apply, and that the war couldn't be launched without UN authorisation.

It is the way of these things that most of the defenders of Karadzic would happily see Blair stand trial, while most of those who would throw the book at him regard the ouster of Saddam as justifiable humanitarian intervention.

But what is needed above all else is logical consistency. Blair clearly has a case to answer; the Iraq invasion has taken, at the very least, 100,000 lives. Famously, he is on record as revealing that he is prepared to be held to account by God for ‘those who have died or have been horribly maimed as a result of my decisions’.

So justifying them before a panel of judges should not present any particular problem, should it? May the Lord have mercy on his soul.

THEY found another mass grave outside Srebrenica this week. But that’s not a particularly unusual event; some 70 such makeshift cemeteries have come to light since the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys by Serb irredentists in July 1995.

The Balkans is famously a part of the world where history impacts on the present, and in that context, the 14 years that have elapsed since the Dayton Accords stilled a conflict that claimed more than 100,000 lives will count for little.

But such a convoluted structure as that concocted by the peace deal was never likely to last. Increasingly there is talk that the centre cannot hold, and that post-Dayton Bosnia is just about to fall apart.

Even as I write this, diplomats are meeting in Sarajevo to discuss how the Office of the High Representative, which bills itself as ‘the chief civilian peace implementation agency’ in the country, can be wound down.

Consideration is also being given to ending the international troop deployment, which has since 2004 technically been under the auspices of the EU-led EUFOR Althea, over the next year or so.

In normal circumstances, it would be fairly automatic for the left to welcome such developments, as a return to national self-determination. But in this case, any EU pull-out has to come with a health warning; the resumption of hostilities could rapidly follow.

Under Dayton, Bosnia was divided into two semi-independent entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by Muslims and Bosnian Croats, and the Serb-controlled Republika Srpska.

The West has done everything it knows how to do to somehow render the resultant lash-up stable. Tens of thousands of troops have been devoted to peacekeeping efforts, and aid outlays have been lavish. In real terms and on a per capita basis, more cash has been bestowed on the 4m or so residents than was spent on efforts to rebuild Germany and Japan after world war two.

Yet nothing has worked. Tensions between the three ethnic groups remain strong, and are intensifying. The economy is at a standstill, with 27% unemployment and 25% of the population living in poverty. Corruption is rife, and ethnic patronage throughout public sector employment is pervasive.

Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik is openly seeking to secure secession from the federation. By contrast, Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim representative on the collective presidency, wants to see a more centralised state. Silajdzic is after the dissolution of the RS, which he regards as essentially a reward for the Serbian genocidaires.

As in Afghanistan and as in Iraq, it has proven easier to break up a state than it is to build one; these two men and the constituencies for which they stand are on a collision course. And the historical experience underlines that flare-ups in Bosnia tend not to remain restricted to Bosnia for long.

In the situation we now face, the back-of-an-envelope formulations of both the mainstream hard left and the humanitarian interventionists reveal themselves as problematic. Of course socialists of both schools should want to see local people running their own affairs, sooner rather than later. But what if the price of getting out is several more Srebrenicas?

I KNOW where Christoph Blocher lives. The billionaire leader of the Schweizerische Volkspartei owns a substantial property – it would probably be fair to call it a castle - that can clearly be seen from the cable car linking Rhäzüns to Feldis, the alpine village where my mother’s ashes have been reburied next to those of her brother and sister.

The SVP, of course, has been the driving force behind the referendum that has seen voters back the call for a constitutional proscription on the construction of minarets on Swiss mosques. Take that as further evidence that Blocher is pushing Swiss politics towards the right, on the back of the growth of a certain ugly xenophobia in a country that has always presented itself as the very model of a successful multinational state.

The Swiss economy has always made use of many seasonal guest workers, and one of my uncles took on Muslims from Turkey and Yugoslavia as well as Catholic Italians at his door factory. Although they had no rights to speak of – they had to return to their country of origin each year – I don’t recall racism being an issue in the 1960s. There was certainly no problem with employees dating the boss’s daughters, for instance. Two of my cousins even married the guys.

Marriage to a Swiss citizen confers the right of residence, and slowly the number of Swiss Muslims began to grow. In 1970 there were just 16,000; today, thanks to a liberalisation of the restrictions on work permits and the arrival fairly sizeable numbers of refugees from Bosnia and Albania, the total stands at 400,000.

As a Swiss national and a fairly regular visitor, I am well aware that the Zwinglian-dominated Germanophone part of the country is naturally conservative on social issues, and unlike some commentators, I am not surprised that the minaret ban won through. But it isn’t necessarily evidence that Switzerland is any more (or any less) racist than anywhere else.

While the decision was clearly the wrong one, the significance may not be that great in practice. There are some 150 mosques and Muslim prayer rooms, all still accorded freedom of worship in accordance with the standards of liberal democracy.

But it is the symbolism is worrying. One day a rightwing populist party, perhaps with mass repatriation as part of its platform, will surely win an election and form a government somewhere in western Europe. That’s when the social fabric will be tested.

HOW would you define a ‘mature democracy’? Would a government that restricts the right to stand in elections solely to candidates approved in advance, and even then regularly stuffs ballot boxes, deserve the designation in your book?

What if you were told that the state in question was an open theocracy which consolidated its hold on power through the execution of tens of thousands of communists and other leftists, at a conservative estimate?

Would it affect your judgement if you were further informed that in the country we are talking about, independent trade unionism is not allowed, and homosexual acts sometimes attract the death penalty?

If you see yourself as a socialist or a liberal, would you pen a leftist apologia for a ‘mature democracy’ that has in the last few days killed at least eight pro-democracy protestors and arrested several key opposition leaders?

Blogger Andy Newman - main writer on Socialist Unity, Britain’s most widely read far left website - would. Thanks to his cadre Marxist background, he can see through the smokescreen of ideology generated by the bourgeois press, designed to dupe the impressionable into misguided solidarity with the victims of the dictatorship in Iran.

It’s their own fault they are corpses. The stupid bastards didn’t seek the ‘dialogue and compromise required for a peaceful win-win resolution’ with Ahmadinejad's 'mature democracy'. Read it all here.

The spooky thing is the way that Newman’s long and unnecessarily prolix screed transposes the arguments that Stalinists and even some orthodox Trotskyists deployed in decades past in defence of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes.

Readers with long enough memories will find many claims in the piece strangely familiar. There is the contention that while the system under discussion is obviously not democratic by our standards, it can - by chop-logic yardsticks - be classified as democratic in a different way; standard liberal criteria do not apply.

Oh, and the economy works to the advantage of the poor. Any amount of evidence adduced that points to the enrichment of the elite is by the by here.

Newman notes that ‘general subsidies have been a big part of the welfare state in post-revolution Iran’, risibly painting Ahmadinejad as some kind of Persian Polly Toynbee.

He thereby forgets that all modern states have some kind of welfare element. He might as well maintain that Hitler operated a pretty neat job creation programme, and offered soft loans to unusually fecund German mothers.

Given the centre of gravity in Marxist thinking in the past, it is just about possible to see where Uncle Joe’s fellow travellers were coming from. But somehow a man politically formed in the one far left tendency that above all others resisted this chain of thought has ended up as a compagnon de route of repressive political Islam.

Let’s dispose right way of the inevitable canards that will surely be thrown in my face. I am opposed to military intervention in Iran by any imperialist power or any imperialist proxy. Nor does opposition to Ahmadinejad imply backing for Mousavi.

Elementary Marxism suggests that both represent opposing factional interests within the same ruling class. So we are duly reminded by Newman that ‘progressives need to avoid a simplistic polarisation between different strands of elite opinion both of which are disadvantageous to the mass of the population’.

That’s a bit of a contradiction, given the way in which he is plainly aligned to Ahmadinejad’s ‘populist and redistributive social welfare policies’.

But we should take our guidance from the Iranian left on this one; you know, Andy, the people you ostensibly uphold as co-thinkers. They are on the streets, participating independently within the broader Mousavi current.

In need of some wriggle room, Newman opts for the famous ‘in so far as’ tactic. ‘In so far as’ the protestors wish to change some of the ‘more oppressive aspects of Iranian society’ and stick to demanding such things as union rights, they can be completely supported. Presumably the less oppressive aspects of Iranian society are fair enough. Newman does not say under which category throwing students off tall buildings can be classified.

Many of Newman’s other positions will astound anyone aware of the revolutionary Marxist tradition in which he was formed. Revolution ‘might mean civil war’, Newman points out. Nobody who has read a few history books will doubt that.

Hilariously, he blasts the Mousavi opposition for its resort to ‘extra-constitutional means’. One shudders to think what he would have made of that naughty boy Lenin, or even the early 1980s Labour Party soft left, which advocated ‘extraparliamentary action’.

The clincher for Andy is that Ahmadinejad has the armed forces on his side. Dictatorships generally do, mate. You are politely referred back to Engels for the Marxist position on ‘bodies of armed men’, comrade.

Newman’s conclusion? The western left should avoid ‘trite cheerleading’ in support of the Mousavi tendency. What we need is to be trite cheerleaders for Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’ instead, he seems to suggest. I think he is wrong.

THE LISBON earthquake of 1755 claimed something like 100,000 lives, a total more or less the same as the estimated death toll from precisely the same cause in Haiti yesterday.

Among the arguably less important consequences of the earlier devastation was a famous bust-up between two leading figures of the Enlightenment, over what philosophers of religion now refer to as the problem of natural evil.

Voltaire insisted that any God who can permit such carnage can hardly be described as benevolent. Rousseau countered that the actions of humanity contribute must take some of the blame; because rickety buildings were erected and people forced to live in close confinement, the Lisbon body count was exacerbated greatly.

I’m not that sure that the two arguments can logically be counterposed. But Rousseau is right to stress that much can be deduced about a society by the way it handles natural disasters. Science and statistical analysis make it easily possible to assess their likelihood, and to take measures to mitigate them when they occur. The trouble is, there needs to be the political will to put the necessary preparations in place.

Earth science has long established that Haiti sits on a fault line. Yet according to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, 60% of the buildings were poorly constructed. One reason that builders get away with it is that there are no safety standards. Moreover, the state had made no real preparation for an outcome that could readily have been predicted. Why is this so?

I have not personally visited Haiti. But from most accounts, it is a textbook example of the way capitalism operates in many of the world’s poorest countries, with the Washington Consensus enforcing by the use of arms policies that succeed only in enriching a small local elite, while ensuring the general impoverishment of everybody else.

The US openly backed the governments of Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc Duvalier between 1957 to 1986 - even though they were widely ranked among the most corrupt dictatorships on the planet - as a cold war counterweight to Cuba. Sweatshop labour in US-oriented export processing zones swelled the numbers flocking to the slums of Port-au-Prince.

The election Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian standing on a broadly social democratic platform, was supposed to change all that. He never got a chance to implement his programme, and was toppled by a military coup within months of taking office in 1991.

He was restored to power three years later, following a US military intervention ordered by Bill Clinton. The quid pro quo was that he was instructed to stick to free market policies. Aristide did his best to split the difference, trying to be both a good reformist and a good neoliberal at the same time. Inevitably, this pleased no-one, and in 2004 he was toppled again, with full complicity from Bush.

The interim regime of Gérard Latortue dismantled Aristide’s reforms, and then let the death squads rip, while the new boss and his cronies pocketed around $4bn in aid donations for their personal gain. Aristide ally René Préval nominally secured victory in the 2006 elections. But nobody is daft enough to believe that the head of state is actually running the show. Brazilian-led UN forces protect the rich, and may even collaborate with the rightwing death squads that rule the streets.

Decades of political drift have done nothing to address deep-seated poverty, crumbling infrastructure and large scale deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters, with severe hurricanes striking the country in 2004 and 2008.

By all means put your hand in your pocket for the emergency relief appeal. It would be inhumane not to do so. But Voltaire’s argument about God applies with equal force to social and political systems; Haiti needs independence from the tutelage of a superpower that notably failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina half a decade ago.

Unless it gets a government with democratic legitimacy and the freedom to implement progressive policies that bring about meaningful economic development, the buildings will collapse again the next time round.

UPDATE: The best channel for donations from people on the left is probably this one.

I’M OVER the jet lag, I’ve done my first day in the office, and now it’s now evening in Hong Kong. But instead of maxing out the company credit card down in Wan Chai, I am sitting in my rented apartment at Causeway Bay, making sure that the Wi-Fi works so that I can carry on blogging.

For the next three weeks, I will be based in this undeniably impressive high-rise city, and will probably be taking some trips to other countries in the region. At the very least, there’s a conference in Singapore next week, and I plan to make an excursion over the border to Shenzhen special economic zone one weekend.

On the political side of things, I have the contact numbers for some local labour movement activists, and a stack of the latest radical books on China. One of the things I’ll be trying to work out is how come a notable wave of soft Sinophilia has overtaken certain sections of the British left.

This is, on the face of it, very odd. Beijing’s human rights record and its continued repression in Tibet and Xinjiang speak for themselves. From a democratic socialist perspective, they don’t say good things, either.

Some far left groups are beyond help, of course. The Morning Star can at least point to a long tradition of preparedness to overlook certain flaws in one party states, so long as that party proclaims itself communist.

Meanwhile, the Sparts, Workers’ Power and the normally more sensible Socialist Party all maintain that China is still in some distorted sense a ‘workers’ state’, and thus in need of defence against what they insist on calling ‘capitalist restoration’. That position does not sit too well with the very obvious real world turbocapitalism I have already witnessed over here, and expect to see more of in China proper.

There’s also blogger Andy Newman, who has written many pro-Beijing posts in the last couple of years. One recent example is his positive write-up of CPBer Jenny Clegg’s ‘China’s Global Strategy’. Comrade Newman argues that China’s turn to the market is ‘misunderstood’, and praises the Communist Party for ‘seeking to leverage its control of the state to promote economic and social development’. This, of course, entails making a new capitalist class extremely rich. But hey, let’s not nitpick.

Also unintentionally hilarious is his reflection that the urban intellectuals experienced the cultural revolution ‘most negatively’. I suppose that’s one way of describing a few years of forced labour in the countryside. Still, at least it knocked the book learnin’ out of most of ‘em.

The Clegg book is sitting on my bedside table, alongside Martin Jacques’ ‘When China Rules the World’ and a compilation of Marx’s journalism on China. I’ll be doing some reviews once I have ploughed through them.

In the meantime, many of the posts on this blog from now until early February will presumably reflect the environment. I don’t proclaim myself an expert on all things Chinese, but I do hope that this trip is going to teach me a lot.

THERE now seems little doubt that Mossad took out Hamas commander Mahmoud al Mabhouh, either with or without the complicity of other Palestinian elements. Yet astonishingly enough, the debate on the assassination somehow centres on alleged duplicitous use of British passports on the part of the Isrealis.

Effectively, the Israeli ambassador to London has been summoned to the Foreign Office for a bollocking, at which David Miliband will tell him: ‘Look, no problems with you lot bumping off that dodgy Pally bloke. But it’s just not on for your country’s hit squads to travel on fake UK papers, old chap. Don’t let us catch you doing it again.’

What is being missed here is the question of whether premeditated extrajudicial murder of specific individuals at the behest of a state can ever be morally legitimate, and whether or not it was morally legitimate in this instance.

Targeted killings – to use the currently fashionable euphemism – are by no means rare. States do it all the time. I’m certainly not ‘demonising Israel’ on this score.

It’s always impossible to provide proof on such matters, but it remains a reasonable surmise that the Russian government had a hand in poisoning Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210. There’s ample evidence that Syria did for Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, and that there was British Army involvement in the slaying of Irish republican solicitor Pat Finucane.

But Israel unquestionably resorts to targeted killings with infelicitous alacrity. One recalls the 2004 guided missile attack on Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin, a wheelchair-bound and almost blind cleric. Nine bystanders died as a result of the incident. I could cite many other cases.

It does seem to me that the al Mabhouh murder breaches the principle of respect for human life. I sure that an excellent hypothetical moral case for targeted killings can be constructed in urgent situations where there are no other means to avoid given imminent harm. But the criteria do not appear to have been met on this occasion.

It may well be that Mossad has successfully eliminated one of the enemies of the country it exists to serve. But where was the clear and present danger? What the Israeli secret service has perpetrated was reprehensible and deserving of international reproach.

CHILE’S second city is under lockdown today, with the country’s post-Pinochet military offering an object lesson in what Marxists mean when they describe the state as the ultimate guarantor of property relations.

Concepción was close to the epicentre of Saturday’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake, in which at least 723 people died. Food and water is running out, so the population has taken to self-service shopping in a bid way, gathering what they need to eat and drink from the ruins of fallen supermarkets.

These scenes are by no means rare. We witnessed them in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and again in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince earlier this year. There can be little doubt that if disasters of similar scale struck Birmingham or Brussels or Barcelona, we would get a repeat performance.

When it comes to securing the basic necessities of life, occurrences of this nature are clearly inevitable. What else are people going to do?

True, some are helping themselves to plasma screen televisions while they are at it. This behaviour is hardly morally commendable. But in the wider scheme of things, heavy duty military mobilisation to prevent theft of consumer durables does not suggest itself as a natural first concern for the authorities.

Yet this is what appears to be happening. Some 7,000 troops have occupied the city, and the local military commander has sent soldiers out with megaphones to warn Concepción’s 500,000 inhabitants that a dusk to dawn curfew has been imposed.

‘I would advise criminals not to mess with the armed forces. Our response will be severe, but within the context of the law,’ he added. One person learned ‘not to mess’ the hard way, and was shot and killed last night.

Meanwhile, there are clear signs of class polarisation, with reports that property owners are organising groups to defend their property, or at least what is left of it. Whether these groups are armed or not is not specified.

Chilean president Michelle Bachelet has weighed in with the obligatory condemnation of ‘pillage and criminality’. What would be rather more to the point would be for Ms Bachelet to condemn the incompetence that has left her government unable to cope with the proverbial ‘small earthquake in Chile, not many dead’.

This was scarcely an unforeseeable event. An administration more concerned with saving lives than stopping the theft of televisions would be detailing the army to help people survive, rather than gunning them down.

Either get some food in there or let the unfortunate earthquake victims use what might otherwise go to waste. And remember that when the massive bill for the damage comes in, the cost of a few poxy TVs is neither here nor there.