Multipolar world, state forms and ideology
What will the effect of the war between Iran and the US/Israel be for us living in the West? What will a victory for a middle-power nation against the global hegemon be? What impact will this have on UK political structures and the system of alliances of which our society may be a part? If this war reconfirms the movement towards a multipolar world, what will constitute the poles of this world? Will there be a renewed assertion and acceptance of sovereignty? Will the energies produced by this new configuration of spheres of influence entail new constitutional elements and new entities? Will it alter the form of our Western ‘imperialist’ states or alter the relationship between society and state. How far, or rather how deep, will this multipolarisation go? As the relationship between states change so will their inner constitution.
The global dominance of ‘western’ imperialism has led to the widespread adoption of the political form of the nation-state that was first developed in Europe in the period following the break up of the Western Roman Empire and reaching a moment of crystallisation with the treaty of Westphalia in that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. This movement with its mythical and ideological underpinnings originated in forms of ‘territorialisation’ of sovereignty based on monarchy or kingship. This was then once again transformed and adapted during the English Revolution of the 17th century and the French Revolution of the 18th. The emerging republican or quasi-republican structures that institutionalised a separation between executive authority and legislative processes have been effective in organising consent to the various ‘client’ and neocolonialist regimes as well as the ‘home’ populations of the imperialist countries. They are neo-colonial and continue imperial domination through a client subordinate group that replicates colonialism.
The nation-states of the imperialist nexus ostensibly promote democracy and freedom. Secularism and modernity are accompanying values. These values are capable of being transposed, even when they are fiercely contradictory, to indigenous spaces. This demonstrates how systems of values and beliefs, hold societies and states together even in circumstances where they have been imported or imposed. However it is noticeable that the states which are today seen as the ‘enemies’ of imperialism have different and distinct state forms. Iran is a republic whose constitution is adapted from that of the French but its ideology is Islam. See Vijay Prashad’s article about Iran’s civilisational strength. The People’s Republic of China was forged through socialist and Marxist values. These were more vivid when the new state was established. Now other possibly deeper roots in the historic culture of China, such as Confucianism and Daoism have been brought into play. Both Chinese and Iranian ‘states’ proclaim that they are civilisations and are held together not by ethnicity nor territory but by inner values that relate to human habitation of a specific region. In Russia the republican structure has been interlaced with the values of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In the US the ideology of ‘chosenism’, an articulation of the destiny of a chosen people empowered by divine right or rule, has grown with the influence of the alliance with Isreal. The cartoon characterisation of Trump as Jesus Christ and the ‘prayer’ orations of the so-called Minister of War, Hegseth, are illustrative. It is equally noticeable that the underlying assumption of ‘chosenism’ has constantly undermined the more general liberal universalist values vaunted by the ‘West’. Humanism in these circumstances becomes the basis for white supremacism. In fact it is as if one is a disguise for the other so that democracy and freedom are used as a means of oppression by appearing to be a means of liberation. Secularism is a disguise for religious extremism. The underlying hypocrisy of the ‘West’ has been exposed in the responses of the imperialist nexus to the genocide in Palestine which they have perpetrated alongside Israel.
Is ideology the determinant of social formation? I don’t think so but it is an essential ingredient in it. The fact that Marxism-Leninism, the body of values and beliefs (and of course with the accompanying images and icons and music) that brought with it the social revolution in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1948, was determined by pragmatism and resonance. The Russian Revolution was seeded in the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Chinese revolution was achieved on the basis of the Russian revolution. However when it came to the Iranian people serving notice on the archaic and corrupt regime of the Shah in 1979, Islam was adopted as the workable means of offering the ‘holding together’ that was necessary for them to move forward. Of course this was a summons that echoed deeply in Iranian/Persian history, culture and common iconography.
However, I want to speak up for the quality of adequacy. Islam in its particular historic and cultural form of Shi’ism has been ‘good enough’ as, what I would call, a ‘combinatory’ ideology. The phrase ‘good enough’ is used by psychotherapists influenced by the work of D W Winnicott to describe ‘mothering’. The idea is that mothers or parents do not have to be perfect. In fact the tension brought about by believing that this hyperbolic state is required can be destructive because it can lead to binary swings. If a mother cannot be the ‘best’ then she might be given over to feelings that she is the ‘worst’. Read Winnicott. This applies to other human relationships as well. I am advocating using it as a functionally creative way of looking at what we might need to help us hold our society together. So not stringent adherence to an intense form of behaviour and belief but a feeling of acceptance and conviviality. However I have to say that this view of ideology may well be circumscribed by a kind of secularism that does not take account of the geo-political and spiritual imperatives that drive ‘civilisational’ states.
Is the version of the state that is exemplified by the fake democracy of the Western states, democracies that are constructed as conduits for consensual submission, that presuppose an ethnic coherence, going to be replaced by a ‘civilisational’ model? This model might admit bioregional and even geographical/spiritual continuities but might ask for the acceptance of what amounts to a functioning ‘combinatory’ ideology, a set of values that more or less provide a kind of carapace and a code of values and behaviour that enables people to live together in justice and peace. Of course I am aware of how these latter words are themselves full of assumptions. However, these kinds of constituencies have existed effectively in the past: for example, the ‘convivencia’ characteristic of Andalus or what was created to some extent, and in certain locations, in the Ottoman Empire. What might be the core values of these systems? An acceptance of difference? Is this an acceptance of hierarchy? Or a kind of admission that there is not absolute rule, that all human beings are, at every living moment, involved in making society. Human beings do it like spiders make webs. We abide in what is given but also to have the capability of changing what is given.
Adaptations may be made by looking backwards as well as forwards. For example, in the period after the death of Mao Zedong (d. 1976) the People’s Republic sought a way of developing their society. They were constrained to look back into their cultural resources and this enabled them to defy the Western economic theory and avoid the ‘shock therapy’ that ravaged Russian society in the 1990s. This was a critical period after the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the famine that followed it, and the Cultural Revolution that followed this tragedy. The debate that took place in the 1980s in China were influenced by the concepts developed in the pre-capitalist societies of the Zhou and Qin and Han dynasties that had produced texts elaborating the principles of the relationship between the state and the market. The Discourses on Salt and Iron (81 BCE during the Han dynasty) and the Guanzi (named after a philosopher who lived 700 BCE though probably composed only a little before the former text earlier in the Han Dynasty) explored the divergent nature of commodities and the impact of their production and distribution on social organisation and well-being. Reference made to these ancient sources of wisdom could have been influential in, why, in the last instance, the People’s Republic avoided a complete liberalisation of prices that could have led to the collapse of the political structures founded in 1948. The Chinese state avoided a ‘Big Bang’ privatisation and liberalisation that led to such devastation in Russia. See Isabella Weber’s How China escaped Shock Therapy
The crucial question in these debates surrounded the collective responsibility of the state for regulating and overseeing the common interests of society. This responsibility and how it is operationalised impacts radically on the form and structure of the state and its institutions. During the War of Liberation against the Japanese occupation and the Nationalist pro-Western forces in China that led to the foundation of the People’s Republic, the success of the Communists was based on their ability to stabilise the liberated areas by creating acceptable and integrated currency systems. This was crucial since the strategy of the liberation process was not to attack the capital and centre of power but to first liberate the outlying regions and conduct a war of encirclement. Whilst the Nationalists suffered inflationary instability the Communist areas maintained essential and self-sufficient production and distribution structures.
What is less than clear is how these observations about what happened in China in the 1980s, are useful for other circumstances. The predominant issues for the Chinese in the 1980s were the accumulation of capital and the management of markets laying the basis for infrastructural development. Can lessons derived from such specific circumstances help in understanding how the societies of the old empire of the West can develop or at least move forward. In the West we are dealing with societies (and locations, resources) that have a corrupted, post-industrial infrastructure and have outsourced industry and agriculture leaving a financialised service sector in a dominant position. Institutional dependency and over-centralisation leave little capability for self sufficiency. The resource base is depleted and exhausted. There is a developed, though ageing, capital infrastructure and a working population that has been deskilled. How can generation or regeneration happen in this context? All the political and economic spaces of the ‘West’ have subjugated themselves to dependence on imperial privilege and global resource extraction with accompanying mentalities. It is almost the opposite situation that faced the Chinese in 1976 but there may be instructive lessons to be learnt. There growth and infrastructural development were linked to the integration with the international market, playing a role in the imperial globalisation process that was predicated on the unipolar centralisation of power and wealth by the USA.
In the situation of the ‘West’ the key question might be: how far or how deep will the process of multipolarisation go? What new forms of sovereignty may emerge? If power reverts to the nation-state by entities breaking away from the global, corporate, centralised financialised dominance, will there be increased popular control over production and distribution? Will this process involve de-centralisation of the society as a whole? Will there be a movement of localisation and an increase in popular participation in managing and enacting change, in care provision and in productive development? It is very difficult to imagine a renewal of Western society without a period of destruction. Even when it is the old order that is decaying, catastrophes are not necessarily good times. It will, in the initial stages, be expressed in a crisis of affordability. This will be another collateral impact of the Iran/US-Israeli war.
Movements forward are accompanied by imaginative and cultural movements back into history and geography, tracing the connection between original indigenous human habitation and the articulation of a specific life through interaction with the bio-regional particularity. If China can look back to and gain nourishment from the values developed by the Han dynasty thinkers mentioned earlier, if Iran can resume the anti-oppression values of Shi’ism the English may look back to the radical egalitarianism that arose during the English Civil War (1642-1660).
In China during the Han Dynasty, and during the 1980s, a key factor was controlled use of the currency. Here ‘multipolarisation’ takes on a deeper meaning. The process of financialisation coeval with neoliberalism has been accompanied by the global domination of the dollar as the international reserve currency. This has led to an intensive centralisation of financial markets. The position of the dollar changed at the point when the dollar was, by edict of the government of the USA, decoupled from the value of gold (the so-called Nixon Shock of 1971). A new system of credit creation backed by armed force was instituted and this was accompanied by the development of the petro-dollar. This was secured through agreements made concurrently with the major oil producer, Saudi Arabia. The value of the dollar became the ‘monopoly’ currency for the oil and energy markets. One of the ‘multipolarisation’ impacts of the Iran/US/Israel war is the displacement of the dollar from this central role. The fall of the Empire of the ‘West’ is will be accompanied by the proliferation of means of exchange of diverse commodities. An example of this, is the requirement by the Islamic Republic that commodities passing through the Strait of Hormuz must use the Chinese Renminbi or a decentralised crypto-currency as a means of exchange. But this process gives an added significance to what we mean by sovereignty in a multipolar world. One crucial aspect of this must be the localised control of currency. In this we should be aware of the crucial ‘social synthetic’ role of money and all the symbolism that surrounds it and its adjacency to issues of ideology. The ‘sovereign’s’ head still appears on the bills of exchange and they are printed with slogans such as ‘In God We Trust’. It is the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel (Intellectual and Manual Labour) that, as far as I know, first related the idea of social synthesis with the abstract idea of value and the money system. The nature of the state and the question of whether it is a power over society or a facility for it, is crucial to process of multipolarisation and the socialisation and localisation that it might entail.
The state has the qualities of both rigidity and fluidity. Uniquely the relationships and spaces that make up the state are where the ideas and plans of the people can take material form. It is also the source of repression, sometimes through incorporation and co-opting, of these consensual movements. By and large, the state moves by processes of tightening and restriction or by movements of dispersal and release (letting go). As the old order comes to an end the state will tighten and intensify itself, becoming more violent and harder and narrower. The new order brings a dispersal, an atomisation, a relaxation of the distribution of functions, greater fluency of resource allocation even if the resources have been diminished. In this sense the multipolarity at an international level may create flows of multipolarity at a national and local level.
Might the process of multipolarisation impact or permeate moral and personal relationships? Will it change the structures of feeling, the spiritual and mental connectivity of culture? Naomi Klein’s insight in The Shock Doctrine was to relate the economic and political forms to the personal and psychological. The character of the human that was projected by financialised capitalism was a tabla rasa. This model held out the promise that the individual had the ultimate power to determine its own identity, destiny and success. The treatment of psychological disorder by electroshock therapy corresponded to the application of creative destruction of social institutions in order to ‘re-wire’ and restart society at point zero. This mentality influenced the torture strategies carried out by the US during the ‘war on terror’ just as it underpinned the military-political actions of the USA regime in the 2003 war on Iraq. The idea of the human individual as a blank, as if its nature lay beyond all cultural and circumstantial effects, was the dream of neoliberalism. Freedom was and is defined as a kind of triumph of the will: you can be what you want to be. It is the model of the rational self-interested utility seeking node of commodity exchange which is at the core of classical economic theory. It is the abstract force of quantity and of money reaching its apotheosis. The correlative idea of this nihilism is the fantasy of annihilation. This takes a particularly dramatic form in the military-political tactic, avowed by the Israelis and the US, of decapitation as a way of transforming social entities. The cultural predisposition grows out of a belief that if somebody gets in your way, the solution is to kill them. There are countless examples of this belief being enunciated. For example, the assertion by Peter Hegseth that the USA ‘negotiates’ by bombing or the actions taken by the Israelis in their attempts (sometimes ‘successful’) to kill the negotiators as a way of commanding agreement.
How far do these moral presuppositions which are based on extreme mechanistic thinking enter the interstices of the societies in whose ruling group they are prevalent. How far have we in the ‘advanced’ societies of the ‘West’ been formed by these socialised habitual processes? How far have they been normalised? Are we ineradicably determined by this version of humanity which seems so inhuman? After all it is essential to capitalism that the relationship between people should be lived as the relationship between things. This is what commodity production, for exchange rather than use, is rooted in. Isn’t the empire of the West, of which the USA is the current hegemon an supreme embodiment of this system, the system of industrial financialised capital? It is clearly not principally an ‘economic system’. This is an illusion. It is a system of rule. The operation of the economy subjugates people, and requires them to enact its fatal reduction.
It has penetrated our bones. It is of our essence. Can we not change ourselves and our society? The available wisdom is that we can make our own history – in fact we are condemned to do so – but we can only do so within circumstances that are given. And we can only do so by recognising the material and cultural circumstances into which we have been born. This involves acute historical knowing and collective understanding but also being quick to see the impacts of geography and ecology on the mentalities that have been cultivated in a given place.
The best thing that can be said is that we can see in the Iran war, that ‘it’ (the Western imperial order) really doesn’t work. From a military point of view, imperialism has so far been made to appear like a vicious but antiquated mendacious anachronism. The logical outcome of the nihilism is the trope characteristic of the ruling ‘neo-conservative’ clique in the US that the empire is the maker of reality itself. According to the masters of the universe what they envisage becomes manifest. This has led to them – and some of us – believing their own lies. The ability to see clearly and listen deeply has been damaged beyond repair. As the enormity of the imperial construction becomes more apparent so does its inoperancy. The size of the historical movement of which we are a part is a measure of how deep we have to go to find our ground and earth ourselves. This involves profound reflection and collective action. The moral basis of our lives requires rebuilding from the bottom up.