Political Islam: in The Service of Imperialism

Scientific Satire from RICHARD LEVINS & RICHARD C. LEWONTIN²p.
54
M O N T H LY
REV I EW
VOL. 59
NO. 7
DECEMBER
2007
A N I N D E P E N D E N T S O C I A L I S T M A G A Z I N E
DE CEMBE R
Abu Ghraib &

What It Is to Be Human
ARSHIN ADIB-MOGHADDAM
POLITICAL ISLAM
20 07
in the service of imperialism

SAMIR AMIN
How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay

V O L . 59
MARTHA E. GIMENEZ
Reclaiming the ’Hood, Changing the World

NO. 7
VIJAY PRASHAD
US$5 / CAN$5 / €3.75 / £2.50

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zine
DECEMBER 2007 MONTHLY REVIEW VOL. 59 NO. 7
An Independent Socialist Magazine Founded in 1949.
LEO HUBERMAN, Editor, 1949–1968 PAUL M. SWEEZY, Editor, 1949–2004 HARRY MAGDOFF, Editor, 1969–2006
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER, Editor MICHAEL D. YATES, Associate Editor CLAUDE MISUKIEWICZ, Assistant Editor
Y O S H I E F U R U H A S H I , MRzine Editor M A RT I N PA D D I O , Circulation and Business Manager
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism
SAMIR AMIN 1
Abu Ghraib and Insaniyat
ARSHIN ADIB-MOGHADDAM 20
Self-Sourcing: How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay!
MARTHA E. GIMENEZ 37
EXCHANGE
On the History of Imperialism Theory
RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY 42
Rediscovering the History of Imperialism: A Reply
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER 52
DOCUMENTS ?
The Nabi Papers
‘ISADOR NABI’ 54
CORRESPONDENCE
A Guaranteed Annual Income Will Not Work
KEN COLLIER 58
A REPLY
STEPHEN J. FORTUNATO JR. 59
REVIEW
Reclaim the Neighborhood, Change the World
VIJAY PRASHAD 60
Notes from the Editors
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Thorstein Veblen, the great-
est critic of U.S. capitalism in the early twentieth century and one of the foremost
social theorists of all times. Veblen was the subject of a special issue of Monthly
Review fifty years ago last July in celebration of the centennial of his birth. He
remains important today from our perspective for at least three reasons: (1) he was
the first to develop a theory of monopoly capitalism, including a recognition not
only of the implications of the rise of a big-business dominated economy, but also
the new role assumed in this era by finance, advertising, the penetration of the
sales effort into the production process, excess productive capacity, etc.; (2)
Veblen provided a strong critique of the ecological destruction of U.S. capitalism
(particularly the devastation of forests); and (3) Veblen’s unbridled wit and sar-
donic language coupled with his keen analysis cut to the heart of capitalist ideol-
(continued on inside back cover)
(continued from inside front cover)
ogy. Thus, for instance, he wrote of the ahistorical character given by orthodox
economics to such categories as capital and wage labor as follows:
They are [viewed as] hedonistically “natural” categories of such taxonomic force
that their elemental lines of cleavage run through the facts of any given economic
situation, regardless of use and wont, even where the situation does not permit
these lines of cleavage to be seen by men and recognized by use and wont; so that,
e.g., a gang of Aleutian Islanders slushing about in the wrack and surf with rakes
and magical incantations for the capture of shell-fish are held, in point of taxo-
nomic reality, to be engaged on a feat of hedonistic equilibration in rent, wages,
and interest. And that is all there is to it. Indeed, for economic theory of this kind,
that is all there is to any economic situation (The Place of Science in Modern
Civilization [New York: Russell and Russell, 1961], p. 193).
Fifty years ago in 1957, the same year that Paul Baran published The Political
Economy of Growth (see the exchange in this issue), Samir Amin completed his
doctoral dissertation on imperialism, which was to become his classic work
Accumulation on a World Scale (1970), translated from the French by Monthly
Review Press in 1974. Since then Amin has continued to analyze developments in
imperialism as they evolved, making him the greatest living Marxist analyst of
imperialism. In this issue we are publishing a very important article by him on
“Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism.” An understanding of the complex,
often contradictory, development of political Islam and its relation to imperialism
is critical for anyone wishing to fathom both the vulnerability of the Middle East
to continued U.S. aggression and the likelihood of further explosive developments
in the region in response.
In this issue we are introducing in MR for the first time Isador Nabi, who will
appear frequently in the magazine over the upcoming year in a special section enti-
tled “The Nabi Papers.” To explain who Nabi is (undoubtedly one of the world’s
most mysterious figures who always crops up when science seeks to self-parody
itself) Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin in their new book Biology Under the
Influence make free with verse from Jonathan Swift writing: “In a jest we spend
our rage” (p. 11). Biology Under the Influence, just published by Monthly Review
Press (and including one short piece defined by the authors as an “Isador Nabi”
selection), is a book that in the words of biologist Steven Rose offers “important
insights into how biology—and science in general—could be reconceptualized in
(continued on page 59)
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Political Islam in the

Service of Imperialism
SAMIR AMIN
All the currents that claim adherence to political Islam proclaim the
“specificity of Islam.” According to them, Islam knows nothing of the
separation between politics and religion, something supposedly distinc-
tive of Christianity. It would accomplish nothing to remind them, as I
have done, that their remarks reproduce, almost word for word, what
European reactionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (such
as Bonald and de Maistre) said to condemn the rupture that the
Enlightenment and the French Revolution had produced in the history of
the Christian West!
On the basis of this position, every current of political Islam chooses
to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture—but “culture” reduced
in actual fact to the conventional affirmation of belonging to a particular
religion. In reality, the militants of political Islam are not truly interested
in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of mem-
bership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision
of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the
immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies impe-
rialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the
one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclu-
sive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every
sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes
and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them.
The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where
actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that
such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas
to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothing but works of
SAMIR AMIN is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His recent books
include The Liberal Virus (Monthly Review Press, 2004), A Life Looking Forward (Zed
Books, 2007), and The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the
Twenty-First Century, forthcoming from Monthly Review Press.
JAMES MEMBREZ translated this essay from the original French.
1
2 M O N T H L Y R E V I E W / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7
charity and means for indoctrination. They are not means of support for
the struggles of the popular classes against the system responsible for
their poverty.
On the terrain of the real social issues, political Islam aligns itself with
the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant imperialism. It defends
the principle of the sacred character of property and legitimizes inequal-
ity and all the requirements of capitalist reproduction. The support by
the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian parliament for the recent reac-
tionary laws that reinforce the rights of property owners to the detriment
of the rights of tenant farmers (the majority of the small peasantry) is but
one example among hundreds of others. There is no example of even one
reactionary law promoted in any Muslim state to which the Islamist
movements are opposed. Moreover, such laws are promulgated with the
agreement of the leaders of the imperialist system. Political Islam is not
anti-imperialist, even if its militants think otherwise! It is an invaluable
ally for imperialism and the latter knows it. It is easy to understand,
then, that political Islam has always counted in its ranks the ruling class-
es of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Moreover, these classes were among its
most active promoters from the very beginning. The local comprador
bourgeoisies, the nouveaux riches, beneficiaries of current imperialist
globalization, generously support political Islam. The latter has re-
nounced an anti-imperialist perspective and substituted for it an “anti-
Western” (almost “anti-Christian”) position, which obviously only leads
the societies concerned into an impasse and hence does not form an ob-
stacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the world system.
Political Islam is not only reactionary on certain questions (notably
concerning the status of women) and perhaps even responsible for fa-
natic excesses directed against non-Muslim citizens (such as the Copts
in Egypt)—it is fundamentally reactionary and therefore obviously can-
not participate in the progress of peoples’ liberation.
Three major arguments are nevertheless advanced to encourage social
movements as a whole to enter into dialogue with the movements of po-
litical Islam. The first is that political Islam mobilizes numerous popular
masses, which cannot be ignored or scorned. Numerous images certain-
ly reinforce this claim. Still, one should keep a cool head and properly as-
sess the mobilizations in question. The electoral “successes” that have
been organized are put into perspective as soon as they are subjected to
more rigorous analyses. I mention here, for example, the huge proportion
of abstentions—more than 75 percent!—in the Egyptian elections. The
power of the Islamist street is, in large part, simply the reverse side of the
R E V I E W O F T H E M O N T H 3
weaknesses of the organized left, which is absent from the spheres in

which current social conflicts are occurring.
Even if it were agreed that political Islam actually mobilizes signifi-
cant numbers, does that justify concluding that the left must seek to in-
clude political Islamic organizations in alliances for political or social ac-
tion? If political Islam successfully mobilizes large numbers of people,
that is simply a fact, and any effective political strategy must include this
fact in its considerations, proposals, and options. But seeking alliances is
not necessarily the best means to deal with this challenge. It should be
pointed out that the organizations of political Islam—the Muslim
Brotherhood in particular—are not seeking such an alliance, indeed even
reject it. If, by chance, some unfortunate leftist organizations come to be-
lieve that political Islamic organizations have accepted them, the first de-
cision the latter would make, after having succeeded in coming to pow-
er, would be to liquidate their burdensome ally with extreme violence,
as was the case in Iran with the Mujahideen and the Fidayeen Khalq.
The second reason put forward by the partisans of “dialogue” is that
political Islam, even if it is reactionary in terms of social proposals, is
“anti-imperialist.” I have heard it said that the criterion for this that I
propose (unreserved support for struggles carried out for social progress)
is “economistic” and neglects the political dimensions of the challenge
that confronts the peoples of the South. I do not believe that this critique
is valid given what I have said about the democratic and national di-
mensions of the desirable responses for handling this challenge. I also
agree that in their response to the challenge that confronts the peoples of
the South, the forces in action are not necessarily consistent in their man-
ner of dealing with its social and political dimensions. It is, thus, possi-
ble to imagine a political Islam that is anti-imperialist, though regressive
on the social plane. Iran, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and
certain resistance movements in Iraq immediately come to mind. I will
discuss these particular situations later. What I contend is that political
Islam as a whole is quite simply not anti-imperialist but is altogether
lined up behind the dominant powers on the world scale.
The third argument calls the attention of the left to the necessity of
combating Islamophobia. Any left worthy of the name cannot ignore the
question des banlieues, that is, the treatment of the popular classes of
immigrant origin in the metropolises of contemporary developed capi-
talism. Analysis of this challenge and the responses provided by various
groups (the interested parties themselves, the European electoral left, the
radical left) lies outside the focus of this text. I will content myself with
expressing my viewpoint in principle: the progressive response cannot be

based on the institutionalization of communitarianism,* which is essen-
tially and necessarily always associated with inequality, and ultimately
originates in a racist culture. A specific ideological product of the reac-
tionary political culture of the United States, communitarianism (already
triumphant in Great Britain) is beginning to pollute political life on the
European continent. Islamophobia, systematically promoted by impor-
tant sections of the political elite and the media, is part of a strategy for
managing community diversity for capital’s benefit, because this sup-
posed respect for diversity is, in fact, only the means to deepen divisions
within the popular classes.
The question of the so-called problem neighborhoods (banlieues) is
specific and confusing it with the question of imperialism (i.e., the im-
perialist management of the relations between the dominant imperialist
centers and the dominated peripheries), as is sometimes done, will con-
tribute nothing to making progress on each of these completely distinct
terrains. This confusion is part of the reactionary toolbox and reinforces
Islamphobia, which, in turn, makes it possible to legitimize both the of-
fensive against the popular classes in the imperialist centers and the of-
fensive against the peoples of the peripheries concerned. This confusion
and Islamophobia, in turn, provide a valuable service to reactionary po-
litical Islam, giving credibility to its anti-Western discourse. I say, then,
that the two reactionary ideological campaigns promoted, respectively,
by the racist right in the West and by political Islam mutually support
each other, just as they support communitarian practices.
Modernity, Democracy, Secularism, and Islam
The image that the Arab and Islamic regions give of themselves today
is that of societies in which religion (Islam) is at the forefront in all areas
of social and political life, to the point that it appears strange to imagine
that it could be different. The majority of foreign observers (political
leaders and the media) conclude that modernity, perhaps even democra-
cy, will have to adapt to the strong presence of Islam, de facto preclud-
ing secularism. Either this reconciliation is possible and it will be neces-
sary to support it, or it is not and it will be necessary to deal with this
region of the world as it is. I do not at all share this so-called realist vi-
sion. The future—in the long view of a globalized socialism—is, for the
peoples of this region as for others, democracy and secularism. This fu-
* A political theory based on “collective cultural identities” as central to understand-
ing dynamic social reality.—Ed.
ture is possible in these regions as elsewhere, but nothing is guaranteed

and certain, anywhere.
Modernity is a rupture in world history, initiated in Europe during
the sixteenth century. Modernity proclaims that human beings are re-
sponsible for their own history, individually and collectively, and conse-
quently breaks with the dominant pre-modern ideologies. Modernity,
then, makes democracy possible, just as it demands secularism, in the
sense of separation of the religious and the political. Formulated by the
eighteenth century Enlightenment, implemented by the French
Revolution, the complex association of modernity, democracy, and secu-
larism, its advances and retreats, has been shaping the contemporary
world ever since. But modernity by itself is not only a cultural revolution.
It derives its meaning only through the close relation that it has with the
birth and subsequent growth of capitalism. This relation has conditioned
the historic limits of “really existing” modernity. The concrete forms of
modernity, democracy, and secularism found today must, then, be con-
sidered as products of the concrete history of the growth of capitalism.
They are shaped by the specific conditions in which the domination of
capital is expressed—the historical compromises that define the social
contents of hegemonic blocs (what I call the historical course of political
cultures).
This condensed presentation of my understanding of the historical
materialist method is evoked here simply to situate the diverse ways of
combining capitalist modernity, democracy, and secularism in their the-
oretical context.
The Enlightenment and the French Revolution put forward a model of
radical secularism. Atheist or agnostic, deist or believer (in this case
Christian), the individual is free to choose, the state knows nothing
about it. On the European continent—and in France beginning with the
Restoration—the retreats and compromises which combined the power
of the bourgeoisie with that of the dominant classes of the pre-modern
systems were the basis for attenuated forms of secularism, understood as
tolerance, without excluding the social role of the churches from the po-
litical system. As for the United States, its particular historical path re-
sulted in the forming of a fundamentally reactionary political culture, in
which genuine secularism is practically unknown. Religion here is a rec-
ognized social actor and secularism is confused with the multiplicity of
official religions (any religion—or even sect—is official).
There is an obvious link between the degree of radical secularism up-
held and the degree of support for shaping society in accord with the
central theme of modernity. The left, be it radical or even moderate,

which believes in the effectiveness of politics to orient social evolution in
chosen directions, defends strong concepts of secularism. The conserva-
tive right claims that things should be allowed to evolve on their own
whether the question is economic, political, or social. As to economy the
choice in favor of the “market” is obviously favorable to capital. In poli-
tics low-intensity democracy becomes the rule, alternation is substituted
for alternative. And in society, in this context, politics has no need for ac-
tive secularism—“communities” compensate for the deficiencies of the
state. The market and representative democracy make history and they
should be allowed to do so. In the current moment of the left’s retreat,
this conservative version of social thought is widely dominant, in formu-
lations that run the gamut from those of Touraine to those of Negri. The
reactionary political culture of the United States goes even further in
negating the responsibility of political action. The repeated assertion that
God inspires the “American” nation, and the massive adherence to this
“belief,” reduce the very concept of secularism to nothing. To say that
God makes history is, in fact, to allow the market alone to do it.
From this point of view, where are the peoples of the Middle East re-
gion situated? The image of bearded men bowed low and groups of
veiled women give rise to hasty conclusions about the intensity of reli-
gious adherence among individuals. Western “culturalist” friends who
call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely find out about the pro-
cedures implemented by the authorities to present an image that is con-
venient for them. There are certainly those who are “crazy for God” (fous
de Dieu). Are they proportionally more numerous than the Spanish
Catholics who march on Easter? Or the vast crowds who listen to tele-
vangelists in the United States?
In any case, the region has not always projected this image of itself.
Beyond the differences from country to country, a large region can be
identified that runs from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all the Arab
peoples (with the exception of those in the Arabian peninsula), the
Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and peoples of the former Soviet Central Asian
republics, in which the possibilities for the development of secularism
are far from negligible. The situation is different among other neighbor-
ing peoples, the Arabs of the peninsula or the Pakistanis.
In this larger region, political traditions have been strongly marked by
the radical currents of modernity: the ideas of the Enlightenment, the
French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the
Third International were present in the minds of everyone and were
much more important than the parliamentarianism of Westminster, for

example. These dominant currents inspired the major models for politi-
cal transformation implemented by the ruling classes, which could be de-
scribed, in some of their aspects, as forms of enlightened despotism.
This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Mohammed Ali or Khedive
Ismail. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran were similar. The
national populism of more recent stages of history belongs to the same
family of modernist political projects. The variants of the model were
numerous (the Algerian National Liberation Front, Tunisian
Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, the Baathism of Syria and Iraq), but
the direction of movement was analogous. Apparently extreme experi-
ences—the so-called communist regimes in Afghanistan and South
Yemen—were really not very different. All these regimes accomplished
much and, for this reason, had very wide popular support. This is why,
even though they were not truly democratic, they opened the way to a
possible development in this direction. In certain circumstances, such as
those in Egypt from 1920 to 1950, an experiment in electoral democracy
was attempted, supported by the moderate anti-imperialist center (the
Wafd party), opposed by the dominant imperialist power (Great Britain)
and its local allies (the monarchy). Secularism, implemented in moder-
ate versions, to be sure, was not “refused” by the people. On the contrary,
it was religious people who were regarded as obscurantists by general
public opinion, and most of them were.
The modernist experiments, from enlightened despotism to radical
national populism, were not products of chance. Powerful movements
that were dominant in the middle classes created them. In this way, these
classes expressed their will to be viewed as fully-fledged partners in
modern globalization. These projects, which can be described as nation-
al bourgeois, were modernist, secularizing and potential carriers of
democratic developments. But precisely because these projects conflict-
ed with the interests of dominant imperialism, the latter fought them re-
lentlessly and systematically mobilized declining obscurantist forces for
this purpose.
The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. It was literal-
ly created in the 1920s by the British and the monarchy to block the path
of the democratic and secular Wafd. Their mass return from their Saudi
refuge after Nasser’s death, organized by the CIA and Sadat, is also well
known. We are all acquainted with the history of the Taliban, formed by
the CIA in Pakistan to fight the “communists” who had opened the
schools to everyone, boys and girls. It is even well known that the Israelis
supported Hamas at the beginning in order to weaken the secular and

democratic currents of the Palestinian resistance.
Political Islam would have had much more difficulty in moving out
from the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the continual,
powerful, and resolute support of the United States. Saudi Arabian soci-
ety had not even begun its move out of tradition when petroleum was
discovered under its soil. The alliance between imperialism and the tra-
ditional ruling class, sealed immediately, was concluded between the
two partners and gave a new lease on life to Wahabi political Islam. On
their side, the British succeeded in breaking Indian unity by persuading
the Muslim leaders to create their own state, trapped in political Islam at
its very birth. It should be noted that the theory by which this curiosity
was legitimated—attributed to Mawdudi—had been completely drawn
up beforehand by the English Orientalists in His Majesty’s service.*
It is, thus, easy to understand the initiative taken by the United States
to break the united front of Asian and African states set up at Bandung
(1955) by creating an “Islamic Conference,” immediately promoted (from
1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam penetrated into the
region by this means.
The least of the conclusions that should be drawn from the observa-
tions made here is that political Islam is not the spontaneous result of the
assertion of authentic religious convictions by the peoples concerned.
Political Islam was constructed by the systematic action of imperialism,
supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subservient
comprador classes. That this state of affairs is also the responsibility of
left forces that neither saw nor knew how to deal with the challenge re-
mains indisputable.
Questions Relative to the Front Line Countries (Afghanistan,
Iraq, Palestine, and Iran)
The project of the United States, supported to varying degrees by their
subaltern allies in Europe and Japan, is to establish military control over
the entire planet. With this prospect in mind, the Middle East was cho-
sen as the “first strike” region for four reasons: (1) it holds the most abun-
dant petroleum resources in the world and its direct control by the
armed forces of the United States would give Washington a privileged
position, placing its allies—Europe and Japan—and possible rivals
*The origin of the force of today’s political Islam in Iran does not show the same his-
torical connection with imperialist manipulation, for reasons discussed in the next sec-
tion.—Ed.
(China) in an uncomfortable position of dependence for their energy

supplies; (2) it is located at the crossroads of the Old World and makes
it easier to put in place a permanent military threat against China, India,
and Russia; (3) the region is experiencing a moment of weakness and
confusion that allows the aggressor to be assured of an easy victory, at
least for the moment; and (4) Israel’s presence in the region,
Washington’s unconditional ally.
This aggression has placed the countries and nations located on the
front line (Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Iran) in the particular situa-
tion of being destroyed (the first three) or threatened with destruction
(Iran).
Afghanistan
Afghanistan experienced the best period in its modern history during
the so-called communist republic. This was a regime of modernist en-
lightened despotism that opened up the educational system to children
of both sexes. It was an enemy of obscurantism and, for this reason, had
decisive support within the society. The agrarian reform that it had un-
dertaken was, for the most part, a group of measures intended to reduce
the tyrannical powers of tribal leaders. The support—at least tacitly—of
the majority of the peasantry guaranteed the probable success of this
well-begun change. The propaganda conveyed by the Western media as
well as by political Islam presented this experiment as communist and
atheist totalitarianism rejected by the Afghan people. In reality, the
regime was far from being unpopular, much like Ataturk in his time.
The fact that the leaders of this experiment, in both of the major fac-
tions (Khalq and Parcham), were self-described as communists is not
surprising. The model of the progress accomplished by the neighboring
peoples of Soviet Central Asia (despite everything that has been said on
the subject and despite the autocratic practices of the system) in com-
parison with the ongoing social disasters of British imperialist manage-
ment in other neighboring countries (India and Pakistan included) had
the effect, here as in many other countries of the region, of encouraging
patriots to assess the full extent of the obstacle formed by imperialism to
any attempt at modernization. The invitation extended by one faction to
the Soviets to intervene in order to rid themselves of the others certain-
ly had a negative effect and mortgaged the possibilities of the modernist
national populist project.
The United States in particular and its allies of the Triad in general
have always been tenacious opponents of the Afghan modernizers, com-
munists or not. It is they who mobilized the obscurantist forces of

Pakistan-style political Islam (the Taliban) and the warlords (the tribal
leaders successfully neutralized by the so-called communist regime), and
they who trained and armed them. Even after the Soviet retreat, the
Najibullah government demonstrated the capability for resistance. It
probably would have gained the upper hand but for the Pakistani mili-
tary offensive that came to the support of the Taliban, and then the of-
fensive of the reconstituted forces of the warlords, which increased the
chaos.
Afghanistan was devastated by the intervention of the United States
and its allies and agents, the Islamists in particular. Afghanistan cannot
be reconstructed under their authority, barely disguised behind a clown
without roots in the country, who was parachuted there by the Texas
transnational by whom he was employed. The supposed “democracy,” in
the name of which Washington, NATO, and the UN, called to the rescue,
claim to justify the continuation of their presence (in fact, occupation),
was a lie from the very beginning and has become a huge farce.
There is only one solution to the Afghan problem: all foreign forces
should leave the country and all powers should be forced to refrain from
financing and arming their allies. To those who are well-intended and ex-
press their fear that the Afghan people will then tolerate the dictatorship
of the Taliban (or the warlords), I would respond that the foreign pres-
ence has been up until now and remains the best support for this dicta-
torship! The Afghan people had been moving in another direction—po-
tentially the best possible—at a time when the West was forced to take
less interest in its affairs. To the enlightened despotism of “communists,”
the civilized West has always preferred obscurantist despotism, infinite-
ly less dangerous for its interests!
Iraq
The armed diplomacy of the United States had the objective of liter-
ally destroying Iraq well before pretexts were actually given to it to do so
on two different occasions: the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and then after
September 11, 2001—exploited for this purpose by Bush with Goebbels-
style cynicism and lies (“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating
it, people will eventually come to believe it”). The reason for this objec-
tive is simple and has nothing to do with the discourse calling for the lib-
eration of the Iraqi people from the bloody dictatorship (real enough) of
Saddam Hussein. Iraq possesses a large part of the best petroleum re-
sources of the planet. But, what is more, Iraq had succeeded in training
scientific and technical cadres that were capable, through their critical
mass, of supporting a coherent and substantial national project. This
danger had to be eliminated by a preventive war that the United States
gave itself the right to carry out when and where it decided, without the
least respect for international law.
Beyond this obvious observation, several serious questions should be
examined: (1) How could Washington’s plan appear—even for a brief his-
torical moment—to be such a dazzling success so easily? (2) What new
situation has been created and confronts the Iraqi nation today? (3) What
responses are the various elements of the Iraqi population giving to this
challenge? and (4) What solutions can the democratic and progressive
Iraqi, Arab, and international forces promote?
Saddam Hussein’s defeat was predictable. Faced with an enemy
whose main advantage lies in its capability to effect genocide with im-
punity by aerial bombardment (the use of nuclear weapons is to come),
the people have only one possible effective response: carry out resistance
on their invaded territory. Saddam’s regime was devoted to eliminating
every means of defense within reach of its people through the systemat-
ic destruction of any organization and every political party (beginning
with the Communist Party) that had made the history of modern Iraq, in-
cluding the Baath itself, which had been one of the major actors in this
history. It is not surprising in these conditions that the Iraqi people al-
lowed their country to be invaded without a struggle, nor even that some
behaviors (such as apparent participation in elections organized by the
invader or the outburst of fratricidal fighting among Kurds, Sunni Arabs,
and Shia Arabs) seemed to be signs of a possible acceptance of defeat (on
which Washington had based its calculations). But what is worthy of
note is that the resistance on the ground grows stronger every day (de-
spite all of the serious weaknesses displayed by the various resistance
forces), that it has already made it impossible to establish a regime of
lackeys capable of maintaining the appearance of order; in a way, that it
has already demonstrated the failure of Washington’s project.
A new situation has, nevertheless, been created by the foreign military
occupation. The Iraqi nation is truly threatened. Washington is incapable
of maintaining its control over the country (so as to pillage its petroleum
resources, which is its number one objective) through the intermediary
of a seeming national government. The only way it can continue its pro-
ject, then, is to break the country apart. The division of the country into
at least three states (Kurd, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab) was, perhaps from
the very beginning, Washington’s objective, in alignment with Israel (the
archives will reveal the truth of that in the future). Today, the “civil war”
is the card that Washington plays to legitimize the continuation of its oc-
cupation. Clearly, permanent occupation was—and remains—the objec-
tive: it is the only means by which Washington can guarantee its control
of the petroleum resources. Certainly, no credence can be given to
Washington’s declarations of intent, such as “we will leave the country
as soon as order has been restored.” It should be remembered that the
British never said of their occupation of Egypt, beginning in 1882, that it
was anything other than provisional (it lasted until 1956!). Meanwhile, of
course, the United States destroys the country, its schools, factories, and
scientific capacities, a little more each day, using all means, including the
most criminal.
The responses given by the Iraqi people to the challenge—so far, at
least—do not appear to be up to facing the seriousness of the situation.
That is the least that can be said. What are the reasons for this? The dom-
inant Western media repeat ad nauseam that Iraq is an artificial country
and that the oppressive domination of Saddam’s “Sunni” regime over the
Shia and Kurds is the origin of the inevitable civil war (which can only
be suppressed, perhaps, by continuing the foreign occupation). The re-
sistance, then, is limited to a few pro-Saddam hard-core Islamists from
the Sunni triangle. It is surely difficult to string together so many false-
hoods.
Following the First World War, the British had great difficulty in de-
feating the resistance of the Iraqi people. In complete harmony with their
imperial tradition, the British imported a monarchy and created a class
of large landowners to support their power, thereby giving a privileged
position to the Sunnis. But, despite their systematic efforts, the British
failed. The Communist Party and the Baath Party were the main orga-
nized political forces that defeated the power of the “Sunni” monarchy
detested by everyone, Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. The violent competition be-
tween these two forces, which occupied center stage between 1958 and
1963, ended with the victory of the Baath Party, welcomed at the time by
the Western powers as a relief. The Communist project carried in itself
the possibility for a democratic evolution; this was not true of the Baath.
The latter was nationalist and pan-Arab in principle, admired the
Prussian model for constructing German unity, and recruited its mem-
bers from the secular, modernist petite bourgeoisie, hostile to obscuran-
tist expressions of religion. In power, the Baath evolved, in predictable
fashion, into a dictatorship that was only half anti-imperialist, in the
sense that, depending on conjunctures and circumstances, a compromise
could be accepted by the two partners (Baathist power in Iraq and U.S.
imperialism, dominant in the region).
This deal encouraged the megalomaniacal excesses of the leader, who
imagined that Washington would accept making him its main ally in the
region. Washington’s support for Baghdad (the delivery of chemical
weapons is proof of this) in the absurd and criminal war against Iran
from 1980 to 1989 appeared to lend credence to this calculation. Saddam
never imagined Washington’s deceit, that modernization of Iraq was un-
acceptable to imperialism and that the decision to destroy the country
had already been made. Saddam fell into the open trap when the green
light was given to annex Kuwait (in fact attached in Ottoman times to the
provinces that constitute Iraq, and detached by the British imperialists in
order to make it one of their petroleum colonies). Iraq was then subject-
ed to ten years of sanctions intended to bleed the country dry so as to fa-
cilitate the glorious conquest of the resulting vacuum by the armed forces
of the United States.
The successive Baathist regimes, including the last one in its declin-
ing phase under Saddam’s leadership, can be accused of everything, ex-
cept for having stirred up the conflict between the Sunni and Shia. Who
then is responsible for the bloody clashes between the two communi-
ties? One day, we will certainly learn how the CIA (and undoubtedly
Mossad) organized many of these massacres. But, beyond that, it is true
that the political desert created by the Saddam regime and the example
that it provided of unprincipled opportunist methods encouraged suc-
ceeding aspirants to power of all kinds to follow this path, often pro-
tected by the occupier. Sometimes, perhaps, they were even naïve to the
point of believing that they could be of service to the occupying power.
The aspirants in question, be they religious leaders (Shia or Sunni), sup-
posed (para-tribal) “notables,” or notoriously corrupt businessmen ex-
ported by the United States, never had any real political standing in the
country. Even those religious leaders whom the believers respected had
no political influence that was acceptable to the Iraqi people. Without
the void created by Saddam, no one would know how to pronounce
their names. Faced with the new political world created by the imperi-
alism of liberal globalization, will other authentically popular and na-
tional, possibly even democratic, political forces have the means to re-
construct themselves?
There was a time when the Iraqi Communist Party was the focus for
organizing the best of what Iraqi society could produce. The Communist
Party was established in every region of the country and dominated the
world of intellectuals, often of Shia origin (I note in passing that the Shia
produced revolutionaries or religious leaders above all, rarely bureau-
crats or compradors!). The Communist Party was authentically popular
and anti-imperialist, little inclined to demagoguery and potentially
democratic. After the massacre of thousands of its best militants by the
Baathist dictatorships, the collapse of the Soviet Union (for which the
Iraqi Communist Party was not prepared), and the behavior of those in-
tellectuals who believed it acceptable to return from exile as camp fol-
lowers of the armed forces of the United States, is the Iraqi Communist
Party henceforth fated to disappear permanently from history?
Unfortunately, this is all too possible, but not inevitable, far from it.
The Kurdish question is real, in Iraq as in Iran and Turkey. But on this
subject also, it should be remembered that the Western powers have al-
ways practiced, with great cynicism, double standards. The repression of
Kurdish demands has never attained in Iraq and Iran the level of police,
military, political, and moral violence carried out by Ankara. Neither Iran
nor Iraq has ever gone so far as to deny the very existence of the Kurds.
However, Turkey must be pardoned for everything as a member of NA-
TO, an organization of democratic nations, as the media remind us.
Among the eminent democrats proclaimed by the West was Portugal’s
Salazar, one of NATO’s founding members, and the no less ardent ad-
mirers of democracy, the Greek colonels and Turkish generals!
Each time that the Iraqi popular fronts, formed around the
Communist Party and the Baath in the best moments of its turbulent his-
tory, exercised political power, they always found an area of agreement
with the principal Kurdish parties. The latter, moreover, have always
been their allies.
The anti-Shia and anti-Kurd excesses of the Saddam regime were cer-
tainly real: for example, the bombing of the Basra region by Saddam’s
army after its defeat in Kuwait in 1990 and the use of gas against the
Kurds. These excesses came in response to the maneuvers of
Washington’s armed diplomacy, which had mobilized sorcerer’s appren-
tices among Shia and Kurds. They remain no less criminal excesses, and
stupid, moreover, since the success of Washington’s appeals was quite
limited. But can anything else be expected from dictators like Saddam?
The force of the resistance to foreign occupation, unexpected under
these conditions, might seem to be miraculous. This is not the case, since
the basic reality is that the Iraqi people as a whole (Arab and Kurd, Sunni
and Shia) detest the occupiers and are familiar with its crimes on a dai-
ly basis (assassinations, bombings, massacres, torture). Given this a unit-
ed front of national resistance (call it what you want) might even be

imagined, proclaiming itself as such, posting the names, lists of organi-
zations, and parties composing it and their common program. This, how-
ever, is not actually the case up to the present for all of the reasons de-
scribed above, including the destruction of the social and political fabric
caused by the Saddam dictatorship and the occupation. Regardless of the
reasons, this weakness is a serious handicap, which makes it easier to di-
vide the population, encourage opportunists, even so far as making them
collaborators, and throw confusion over the objectives of the liberation.
Who will succeed in overcoming these handicaps? The communists
should be well placed to do so. Already, militants who are present on the
ground are separating themselves from the leaders of the Communist
Party (the only ones known by the dominant media) who, confused and
embarrassed, are attempting to give a semblance of legitimacy to their
rallying to the collaborationist government, even pretending that they are
adding to the effectiveness of armed resistance by such action! But, un-
der the circumstances, many other political forces could make decisive
initiatives in the direction of forming this front.
It remains the case that, despite its weaknesses, the Iraqi people’s re-
sistance has already defeated (politically if not yet militarily)
Washington’s project. It is precisely this that worries the Atlanticists in
the European Union, faithful allies of the United States. Today, they fear
a U.S. defeat, because this would strengthen the capacity of the peoples
of the South to force globalized transnational capital of the imperialist
triad to respect the interests of the nations and peoples of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America.
The Iraqi resistance has offered proposals that would make it possible
to get out of the impasse and aid the United States to withdraw from the
trap. It proposes: (1) formation of a transitional administrative authority
set up with the support of the UN Security Council; (2) the immediate
cessation of resistance actions and military and police interventions by
occupying forces; (3) the departure of all foreign military and civilian au-
thorities within six months. The details of these proposals have been
published in the prestigious Arab review Al Moustaqbal al Arabi (January
2006), published in Beirut.
The absolute silence with which the European media oppose the dis-
semination of this message is a testament to the solidarity of the imperi-
alist partners. Democratic and progressive European forces have the du-
ty to dissociate themselves from this policy of the imperialist triad and
support the proposals of the Iraqi resistance. To leave the Iraqi people to
confront its opponent alone is not an acceptable option: it reinforces

the dangerous idea that nothing can be expected from the West and its
peoples, and consequently encourages the unacceptable—even crimi-
nal—excesses in the activities of some of the resistance movements.
The sooner the foreign occupation troops leave the country and the
stronger the support by democratic forces in the world and in Europe
for the Iraqi people, the greater will be the possibilities for a better fu-
ture for this martyred people. The longer the occupation lasts, the more
dismal will be the aftermath of its inevitable end.
Palestine
The Palestinian people have, since the Balfour Declaration during
the First World War, been the victim of a colonization project by a for-
eign population, who reserve for them the fate of the “redskins,”
whether one acknowledges it or pretends to be ignorant of it. This pro-
ject has always had the unconditional support of the dominant imperi-
alist power in the region (yesterday Great Britain, today the United
States), because the foreign state in the region formed by that project
can only be the unconditional ally, in turn, of the interventions re-
quired to force the Arab Middle East to submit to the domination of
imperialist capitalism.
This is an obvious fact for all the peoples of Africa and Asia.
Consequently, on both continents, they are spontaneously united on
the assertion and defense of the rights of the Palestinian people. In
Europe, however, the “Palestinian question” causes division, produced
by the confusions kept alive by Zionist ideology, which is frequently
echoed favorably.
Today more than ever, in conjunction with the implementation of
the U.S. “Greater Middle East project,” the rights of the Palestinian
people have been abolished. All the same, the PLO accepted the Oslo
and Madrid plans and the roadmap drafted by Washington. It is Israel
that has openly gone back on its agreement, and implemented an even
more ambitious expansion plan. The PLO has been undermined as a re-
sult: public opinion can justly reproach it with having naively believed
in the sincerity of its adversaries. The support provided by the occupa-
tion authorities to its Islamist adversary (Hamas), in the beginning, at
least, and the spread of corrupt practices in the Palestinian adminis-
tration (on which the fund donors—the World Bank, Europe, and the
NGOs—are silent, if they are not party to it) had to lead to the Hamas
electoral victory (it was predictable). This then became an additional
pretext immediately put forward to justify unconditional alignment

with Israeli policies no matter what they may be.
The Zionist colonial project has always been a threat, beyond
Palestine, for neighboring Arab peoples. Its ambitions to annex the
Egyptian Sinai and its effective annexation of the Syrian Golan are testi-
mony to that. In the Greater Middle East project, a particular place is
granted to Israel, to its regional monopoly of nuclear military equipment
and its role as “indispensable partner” (under the fallacious pretext that
Israel has technological expertise of which the Arab people are incapable.
What an indispensable racism!).
It is not the intention here to offer analyses concerning the complex
interactions between the resistance struggles against Zionist colonial ex-
pansion and the political conflicts and choices in Lebanon and Syria. The
Baathist regimes in Syria have resisted, in their own way, the demands of
the imperialist powers and Israel. That this resistance has also served to
legitimize more questionable ambitions (control of Lebanon) is certainly
not debatable. Moreover, Syria has carefully chosen the least dangerous
allies in Lebanon. It is well known that the Lebanese Communist Party
had organized resistance to the Israeli incursions in South Lebanon (di-
version of water included). The Syrian, Lebanese, and Iranian authorities
closely cooperated to destroy this dangerous base and replace it with
Hezbollah. The assassination of Rafiq al-Harriri (a still unresolved case)
obviously gave the imperialist powers (the United States in front, France
behind) the opportunity to intervene with two objectives in mind: (1)
force Damascus to align itself permanently with the vassal Arab states
(Egypt and Saudi Arabia)—or, failing that, eliminate the vestiges of a de-
teriorated Baathist power; and (2) demolish what remains of the capa-
bility to resist Israeli incursions (by demanding the disarmament of
Hezbollah). Rhetoric about democracy can be invoked within this con-
text, if useful.
Today to accept the implementation of the Israeli project in progress
is to ratify the abolition of the primary right of peoples: the right to ex-
ist. This is the supreme crime against humanity. The accusation of “anti-
Semitism” addressed to those who reject this crime is only a means for
appalling blackmail.
Iran
It is not our intention here to develop the analyses called for by the
Islamic Revolution. Was it, as it has been proclaimed to be among sup-
porters of political Islam as well as among foreign observers, the decla-
ration of and point of departure for a change that ultimately must

seize the entire region, perhaps even the whole Muslim world, re-
named for the occasion the umma (the “nation,” which has never
been)? Or was it a singular event, particularly because it was a unique
combination of the interpretations of Shia Islam and the expression of
Iranian nationalism?
From the perspective of what interests us here, I will only make two
observations. The first is that the regime of political Islam in Iran is
not by nature incompatible with integration of the country into the
globalized capitalist system such as it is, since the regime is based on
liberal principles for managing the economy. The second is that the
Iranian nation as such is a “strong nation,” one whose major compo-
nents, if not all, of both popular classes and ruling classes, do not ac-
cept the integration of their country into the globalized system in a
dominated position. There is, of course, a contradiction between these
two dimensions of the Iranian reality. The second one accounts for
Teheran’s foreign policy tendencies, which bear witness to the will to
resist foreign diktats.
It is Iranian nationalism—powerful and, in my opinion, altogether
historically positive—that explains the success of the modernization
of scientific, industrial, technological, and military capabilities under-
taken by the Shah’s regime and the Khomeinist regime that followed.
Iran is one of the few states of the South (with China, India, Korea,
Brazil, and maybe a few others, but not many!) to have a national
bourgeois project. Whether it be possible in the long term to achieve
this project or not (my opinion is that it is not) is not the focus of our
discussion here. Today this project exists and is in place.
It is precisely because Iran forms a critical mass capable of at-
tempting to assert itself as a respected partner that the United States
has decided to destroy the country by a new preventive war. As is well
known, the conflict is taking place around the nuclear capabilities that
Iran is developing. Why should not this country, just like others, have
the right to pursue these capabilities, up to and including becoming a
nuclear military power? By what right can the imperialist powers and
their Israeli accomplice boast about granting themselves a monopoly
over weapons of mass destruction? Can one give any credit to the dis-
course that argues that “democratic” nations will never make use of
such weapons like “rogue states” could, when it is common knowl-
edge that the democratic nations in question are responsible for the
greatest genocides of modern times, including the one against the
Jews, and that the United States has already used atomic weapons and
still today rejects an absolute and general ban on their use?
Conclusion
Today, political conflicts in the region find three groups of forces
opposed to one another: those that proclaim their nationalist past (but
are, in reality, nothing more than the degenerate and corrupt inheri-
tors of the bureaucracies of the national-populist era); those that pro-
claim political Islam; and those that are attempting to organize around
“democratic” demands that are compatible with economic liberalism.
The consolidation of power by any of these forces is not acceptable to
a left that is attentive to the interests of the popular classes. In fact,
the interests of the comprador classes affiliated with the current im-
perialist system are expressed through these three tendencies. U.S.
diplomacy keeps all three irons in the fire, since it is focused on using
the conflicts among them for its exclusive benefit. For the left to at-
tempt to become involved in these conflicts solely through alliances
with one or another of the tendencies* (preferring the regimes in place
to avoid the worst, i.e., political Islam, or else seeking to be allied with
the latter in order to get rid of the regimes) is doomed to fail. The left
must assert itself by undertaking struggles in areas where it finds its
natural place: defense of the economic and social interests of the pop-
ular classes, democracy, and assertion of national sovereignty, all con-
ceptualized together as inseparable.
The region of the Greater Middle East is today central in the con-
flict between the imperialist leader and the peoples of the entire
world. To defeat the Washington establishment’s project is the condi-
tion for providing the possibility of success for advances in any region
of the world. Failing that, all these advances will remain vulnerable in
the extreme. That does not mean that the importance of struggles car-
ried out in other regions of the world, in Europe or Latin America or
elsewhere, should be underestimated. It means only that they should
be part of a comprehensive perspective that contributes to defeating
Washington in the region that it has chosen for its first criminal strike
of this century.
* Tactical alliances arising from the concrete situation are another matter, e.g., the
joint action of the Lebanese Communist Party with Hezbollah in resisting the Israeli in-
vasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006.—Ed.
Abu Ghraib and Insaniyat
ARSHIN ADIB-MOGHADDAM
The issues that I will cover in this article and the cases I would like
to describe make for uncomfortable reading. But I believe that it is im-
portant to record the torture at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in
Iraq and to deconstruct the culture that accommodated and legitimat-
ed it, because what happened cannot be relegated to a mere footnote
in the history of the region. I feel the same about Halabja and the chem-
ical warfare employed by Saddam Hussein with the sponsorship of the
“international community,” which is why I covered it in my other writ-
ings.1 I do not want to be misunderstood as arguing that the cultural
context I will explain here is all-encompassing, that the U.S. presence
in international society is singularly destructive, and that the “West”
as an idea is nothing but “intoxicating.”2 What I say is much more con-
fined. I am arguing that Abu Ghraib could not have happened without
a particular racist current in the United States, that the individuals
who committed the atrocities against the detainees were not isolated,
and that they were part of a larger constellation with its own signify-
ing ideational attitudes toward Muslims and Arabs. Those are the gen-
eral claims that I would like to qualify in the following paragraphs.
I found it characteristic that it was a novelist, namely Susan Sontag,
rather than a scholar of international relations or “Middle Eastern”
studies, who made the link between the torture at Abu Ghraib and the
type of racist culture I am trying to explain to you.3 In one of her last
essays published in the United Kingdom, Sontag compares the pic-
tures of the tortured Iraqi inmates with the photographs of “black vic-
tims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show
small-town Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, re-
spectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a
black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.” For Sontag,
the meaning of the pictures “is not just that these acts were per-
formed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was any-
ARSHIN ADIB-MOGHADDAM is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf:
A Cultural Genealogy (Routledge, 2006) and Iran in World Politics: The Question of the
Islamic Republic (Hurst, 2007). He lectures on international relations and Islamic politi-
cal thought at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
20
A B U G H R A I B A N D I N S A N I Y A T 21
thing wrong in what the pictures show.” She finds it even more dis-
turbing that the “pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by
many people, it was all fun. And this idea of fun,” she concludes, “is,
alas, more and more...part of ‘the true nature and heart of America.’”4
It was Michel Foucault, of course, who chartered the disappearance
of torture as a public spectacle in eighteenth-century Europe and
America. “By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth century,” Foucault observes, “the gloomy festival of punish-
ment was dying out, though here and there it flickered momentarily
into life.” In France the amende honorable was finally abolished in
1830. Another practice of public punishment and ridicule, the pillory,
was abolished in France in 1789 and in England in 1837. In most coun-
tries of Western Europe and the United States official public execu-
tions preceded by torture had almost entirely been abolished by
1830–48.5 “One no longer touched the body,” as Foucault wrote:
If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of
the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to
strict rules, and with a much “higher” aim....Today a doctor must watch
over those condemned to death [Foucault wrote before the death penal-
ty was abolished in France]...thus juxtaposing himself as the agent of
welfare, as the alleviator of pain, with the official whose task it is to end
life....A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the pa-
tient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict
pain; impose penalties free of all pain.6
This rationalization of punishment was central to the system of tor-

ture at Abu Ghraib, where interrogators were very conscious “not to
leave marks on the body” of the victims.7 Indeed, a report, by the
British medical journal The Lancet, established in August 2004 that
U.S. military doctors and medics were “complicit” in the torture of
Iraqi detainees and faked death certificates to try and cover up homi-
cides. “The medical system collaborated with designing and imple-
menting psychologically and physically coercive interrogations,”
writes the author, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles.
“Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped de-
sign, approve, and monitor interrogations.”8
At Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq then, torture and science
worked hand in hand. Would it not be naïve, thus, to assume that
what happened was an aberration, that it was confined to the acts of
a few “deranged” individuals as the trials against Charles Graner Jr.
and his girlfriend Lynndie England want us to believe? If we would

concur with U.S. Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who inves-
tigated the Abu Ghraib case, it was not. In his report dated March
2004, Taguba found that “between October and December 2003 at the
Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF) numerous incidents of
sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on sever-
al detainees,” which he classifies as “systemic and illegal abuse,” per-
petrated by “several members of the military police guard force.”9
More specifically, the abuse included:
Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked
feet...Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions
for photographing...Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s un-
derwear...Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves
while being photographed and videotaped...Arranging naked male de-
tainees in a pile and then jumping on them...Positioning a naked de-
tainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires
to his fingers, toes, and penis to stimulate electric torture...Placing a
dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female
soldier pose for a picture...A male MP guard having sex with a female
detainee...Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees....10
General Taguba would say later that the United States “violated the
tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and
we violated the core of our military values...even today...those civilian
and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”11 The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) came to similar con-
clusions. Avoiding the term “torture” it stated in a report in February
2004, that “physical and psychological coercion used by the inter-
rogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by
military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract in-
formation.”12 Another report filed by former U.S. secretary of defense
and ex-director of the CIA, James Schlesinger, was equally adamant to
avoid the term “torture,” classifying the events as “brutality and pur-
poseless sadism....The pictured abuses,” the report claims, “were not
part of authorized interrogations nor were they even directed at intel-
ligence targets.”13
A similar emphasis on the term “abuse” rather than “torture” can
be discerned from the Fay-Jones Report which states that “clearly
abuses occurred at the prison at Abu Ghraib,” which were committed
by a “small group of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians.” The same
report describes how detainees “were forced to crawl on their stom-
achs and were handcuffed together [and] act as though they were hav-
ing sex.” It also presents the case of DETAINEE-08 who was beaten
“for half an hour...with a chair until it broke, hit in the chest, kicked,
and choked until he lost consciousness. On other occasions,” it is fur-
ther stated, “DETAINEE-08 recalled that CPL Graner would throw his
food into the toilet and say ‘go take it and eat it.’” Even the case of
DETAINEE-07, who was made to “bark like a dog, being forced to
crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being
struck causing unconsciousness,” is classified as abuse rather than
torture.14
There were, of course, very straightforward measures to rational-
ize and thus diminish what happened at Abu Ghraib. The Mikolashek
Report submitted in July 2004 describes the different “legitimate” in-
terrogation “approaches” that can be employed by U.S. government
personnel during interrogations. These range from the Fear-Up
Approach according to which the “interrogator behaves in an over-
powering manner with a loud and threatening voice” to the Pride and
Ego–Down Approach which is “based on the source’s sense of per-
sonal worth. Any source who shows any real or imagined inferiority
or weakness about himself, loyalty to his organization, or [who was]
captured under embarrassing circumstances,” it is explained, “can be
easily broken with this approach technique.”15 Having set the legal
boundaries between “torture,” “abuse,” and legitimate “interrogation
techniques,” the report comes to the conclusion that
despite the demands of the current operating environment against an

enemy who does not abide by the Geneva Conventions, our comman-
ders have adjusted to the reality of the battlefield and, are effectively
conducting detainee operations while ensuring the humane treatment
of detainees.16
I am not concerned here with explaining legally why what hap-

pened in Iraq amounts to systematic torture. This is something that
has been done by others more qualified to do so than I am, namely the
American Bar Association in their report to their House of Delegates
submitted in August 2004.17 What has not been adequately explored
and what I found at least equally important is the overarching cultur-
al environment that allowed Abu Ghraib to happen. Here, I agree with
Foucault that there is no system of punishment, no judicial process,
no legal institution, and no form of torture that can or has ever stood
independent of the many political, socio-cultural, and historical
structures that give epochs their peculiar individuality.

The real issue of the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq is
not only the photographs then, but what they reveal about contempo-
rary U.S. culture. I am not referring here to the repeated calls for war
by leading U.S. neoconservatives and their functionaries in the me-
dia.18 I am talking about the rather more subtle ways that are em-
ployed to habituate us to violence, to make it appear normal to be
brutal: the computer games that stimulate war and destruction, the
CNN footage of yet another “laser guided bomb” or “surgical strike”
that hit the living room of innocent civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq,
the staged violence celebrated in highly successful talk shows such as
Jerry Springer, and the beheadings of hostages in the name of God by
al-Qaeda affiliated groups for that matter (the video clips of which are
readily available on the Internet). What formerly was outlawed as
sadomasochism and extreme pornography is now being normalized
and disseminated to the public through the World Wide Web, chat
rooms, and other effective communication channels. This rather new
development in human relations implies that the power to exercise
and display subjugation, which since the ancient world had been the
prerogative of the ruler or a defined social institution, suddenly is dis-
persed to the general public, including the child abuser, sado-
masochist, and rapist.
There are many consequences triggered by this new kind of “anar-
chic liberalism.” When the modern state punishes its citizens, it does
so in the name of order. Through a whole series of legitimating prac-
tices—judicial hearings, cross-examinations, police investigations,
etc.—a “proportionate” punishment for the crime is found and an
“equitable” sentence is proclaimed and carried out. Ultimately, the
whole judicial exercise—whether in a social democracy or a dictator-
ship—is there to objectify the sentence, to make it appear just and
right.
Conversely, when an invading army punishes, it does so in a way
as to display a show not of measure or even-handedness, but of ex-
cess. In this kind of dialectic between the punisher and victim, an ex-
treme form of “imperial realism” rules; superiority has to be displayed
violently and with unadulterated physical force. It is not enough to
humiliate the victim, it is not enough to physically demonstrate abso-
lute power to the body of the subject, to break the victim; it has to be
ingrained in the victim’s memory and, more importantly, in the con-
sciousness of the occupied nation that you have been habituated to
hate. This is “licentious power”; power that is motivated by desire,

power that is total in its ambition, the type of power that feminizes
its object in order to violate her. As Joseph Massad wrote in the af-
termath of the Abu Ghraib scandal:
While Western Orientalist accounts never tire of speaking of sexism
and women’s oppression in the Arab World, including the Western
horror at “honour crimes,” it might be time to address the rampant
Western misogyny which disdains all that is feminine and posits wom-
en as the terrain of male conquest. It should not be forgotten that in
America, not in the Muslim World, between 40 per cent and 60 per
cent of women killed, are killed by their husbands and boyfriends. . . . It
is with this misogyny as background, that the US military understood
well that American male sexual prowess, usually reserved for American
women, should be put to military use in imperial conquests. In such a
strategy, Iraqis are posited by American super-masculine fighter-
bomber pilots as women and feminised men to be penetrated by the
missiles and bombs ejected from American warplanes. By feminising
the enemy as the object of penetration (real and imagined), American
imperial military culture supermasculinises not only its own male sol-
diers, but also its female soldiers who can partake in the feminisation
of Iraqi men.19
There is a second very pronounced difference between punishment

exercised by the state over its citizens and punishment by an invading
army. The judicial process implemented by most modern states, al-
lows for a certain degree of “romantic heroism,” especially in a situa-
tion where the state cannot sustain order and its own legitimacy ex-
cept by force. When the punishment cannot be objectified through the
judicial process or the overall culture of the polity, society is likely to
celebrate the condemned. This is what happened to the social
democrats and communists who were falsely accused of burning
down the Reichstag in Nazi Germany. It is also what happened to Che
Guevara, Aung Sun Tsu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, and
others who were deemed terrorists and traitors only to be celebrated
by the masses. In the modern history of Iran, moreover, opposing the
state almost inevitably paved the way to a cell in Evin Prison (or
“Hotel Evin” according to current reformists who have been incarcer-
ated). Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Shariati, Ahmad Shamlu, and others
who were imprisoned in the pre-revolutionary period gained legiti-
macy for their respective activism not at least because incarceration
became a measure of their sacrifice, their willingness to be punished
for the freedom of their ideas. Indeed, when freedom of speech is

criminalized, the difference between “good” and “bad” is blurred and
society is unlikely to accept the “criminal intellectual” as a new cate-
gory to be punished by the state. Against the arrogance of the ruler,
against the rich and powerful, against the mostakbaran (oppressors),
the “criminal intellectual” appears to be engaged in a battle with
which everyone could identify; the “criminal” is transformed into the
folk hero.
This opportunity was denied to the victims of Abu Ghraib. The sub-
jects of torture are silenced and pushed into passivity, not only by the
humiliating act of mental and physical punishment, but also by us, the
spectators of their plight who pity them, but who do not really want
to think about the consequences electroshocks on genitals will have on
the psyche of the victim. Abu Ghraib was in many ways too horrific,
too disgusting, and too brutal to be comprehended. It must have hap-
pened in a suspended universe, a place that was “unreal.” This is of
course, how German citizens came to terms with the existence of the
concentration camps. Disturbing realities are externalized, pushed
away so not to disturb the order of things, which explains why Abu
Ghraib has not left a mark on the collective consciousness of
Americans and the West more generally.
Many will say that at the end of the process, punishment always
terrorizes its subject, frightens her, and intimidates her psychologi-
cally and, in most countries of West Asia, quite legally even physical-
ly. But the type of public punishment exercised at Abu Ghraib went
beyond terror. To my mind what occurred was rather more momen-
tous. It was indicative of the increasing discrepancy between two cul-
tures, two ways of acting, two types of humanness; it dramatically
blurred the boundaries of bashariyat and insaniyat.
Let me explain. In a lecture given during the emerging revolution-
ary atmosphere of late 1960s Iran, Ali Shariati established the differ-
ence between those two types of humanness. “Bashar,” he explains,
“is that particular being that contains physiological characteristics
which are shared by all humans, regardless of whether they are black,
white, yellow, Western, religious or non-religious.” In that sense the
victims of Abu Ghraib and their torturers were both bashar, they were
both human in a strictly biological sense. Insan, on the other side, has
a rather more normative connotation. “Bashar is a ‘being’ while insan
is a ‘becoming.’” To become insan we have to foster three traits: our
self-consciousness, our ability to make choices, and our ability to cre-
ate things. The aim of humanity is to attain the highest form of con-
sciousness, to become insan. But mind you, Shariati warns, “becoming
insan is not a stationary event, rather, it is a perpetual process of be-
coming and an everlasting evolution towards infinity.”20
Why does Shariati stress the procedural component of insaniyat?
Because becoming designates emergence. Shariati stresses that we
should not think of insaniyat as a destination, but a never-ending jour-
ney. “Thus, from among all humans, everyone is as much bashar as the
rest, but there are some who have attained insanyat, and there are oth-
ers who are in the process of becoming an insan, either little or to an
exalting degree.”21 The emergence of a humane consciousness, which
is characteristic of attaining insaniyat, must always be precipitated,
even constituted, by some kind of force which is why Shariati focuses
on the human tendency to revolt against injustice, a theme that he ex-
plores in close relation to the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, Jesus, and
other religious figures.22 It is precisely these monumental epics of hu-
man history that function as the signifiers of justice versus injustice. It
is here where the space dividing good and evil becomes ever more vis-
ible, and it is in this sense that we can interpret the tortures at Abu
Ghraib as a monumentally atrocious event of contemporary history, an
outrageous assault on the very principles that constitute us as insan.
Ultimately, Abu Ghraib, like the public display of death celebrated by
the Romans or perpetuated by the armies of Yazid, established yet an-
other discontinuity in the advancement of humankind to the culture
of insaniyat that Sharitai was referring to.
The torture at Abu Ghraib did not only, and rather dramatically, ac-
centuate the fundamental difference between bashariyat and insaniy-
at, it also showed the perverse excesses that licentious power can gen-
erate. At the time when the scandal was reported in early 2004, Iraqi
society, was defenseless. With the absence of functioning state insti-
tutions, binding legal structures, an active civil society, or effective
NGOs, Iraq was in many ways in a Hobbesian “state of nature.”
Within that constellation, the Leviathan exercises absolute rule.
Without the existence of constraints or any counter-narratives that
could challenge the status-quo, the Leviathan has the absolute power
of rationalization; he assumes the status of prosecutor, jury, judge, and
defense lawyer all in one. Consider this account of a U.S. soldier who
was questioned by Human Rights Watch:
A few more weeks of this, and a group of us went to the colonel there
and told him we were uneasy about...this type of abuse, or just the
treatment....And within a couple hours a team of two JAG officers, JAG

lawyers, came and gave us a couple of hours slide show on why this is
necessary, why this is legal, they’re enemy combatants, they’re not
POWs, and so we can do all this stuff to them and so forth....Some of
the slides were about the laws of war, the Geneva Convention, but it
was kind of a starting-off point for them to kind of spout-off, you know:
why we don’t have to follow these Geneva Convention articles and so
forth. Like, you know, inhumane and degrading treatment, well, this
specifically relates to POWs so we don’t have to do this. So basically we
can do inhumane and degrading treatment.
And then they went on to the actual treatment itself, what we were
doing, what we’d signed off on and those type of things: cold water and
nudity, strobe lights, loud music—that’s not inhumane because they’re
able to rebound from it. And they claim no lasting mental effects or
physical marks or anything, or permanent damage of any kind, so it’s
not inhumane. And then there was also [discussion about] degrading
[treatment]. Like what’s more degrading than being thrown complete-
ly naked in the middle of a mud pile, with everybody looking at you
and spraying water on you....I felt they were really kind of patronising
us and blowing smoke and just treating us like children. Like “Well it’s
OK.” [They] just came and said whatever they had to say to patch it up
and continue with the war.23
Thus, the torture at Abu Ghraib could only happen within a con-
stellation where power was distributed in an extremely irregular fash-
ion. This dysfunction of power relations was the direct outcome of the
invasion in 2003, of course. The legitimation of the war as a part of the
“war on terror” is quite central here. In effect it represented Iraq as an
ally of bin Laden, which explains why U.S. soldiers marked some of
their bombs with messages such as “with love from Ground Zero,” or
“in the name of the New York Fire Department.” That the link be-
tween al-Qaeda and Iraq was invented was rather obvious to most se-
rious observers of the Iraqi-Baathist state. Yet it took the U.S. Defense
Department four years to establish what most of us knew, i.e., that
Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before
the invasion. Ironically, the report’s release came on the same day that
Vice President Cheney, appearing on a radio program, repeated his al-
legation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq “before we ever
launched” the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
who was killed in June 2006. The report, in a recently declassified sec-
tion, indicated that it was Douglas Feith, then U.S. undersecretary of
defense, who asserted in a briefing given to Cheney’s chief of staff in
September 2002, that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was
“mature” and “symbiotic,” marked by shared interests, and evidenced
by cooperation across ten categories, including training, financing,
and logistics.24 Thus, Iraqis were labeled “terrorists,” a priori in order
to maximize U.S. power before, during, and after the invasion, to
make it easier for U.S. soldiers “to pull the trigger.” It is within this
power constellation that they were introjected with hate. Consciously,
through the myth of Iraqi complicity in 9/11, and unconsciously through
the constant vilification of Islamic culture in the international media,
U.S. soldiers were coded to loathe their victims, the natives who were
“complicit” in the attack on the American homeland, the Muslim ene-
my who had to be broken, the colonized people who were there to be
punished.25 “I think part of the problem is the blatant racism against the
Arabs,” states a U.S. soldier pertinently. “When you have an enemy you
kind of have to demonize them a little bit like that in order to make
yourself capable of pulling a trigger.”27 “Predisposition + opportunity,”
General Taguba establishes later “= criminal behavior.” Taguba also
concludes that
Soldiers were immersed in the Islamic culture, a culture that many
were encountering for a first time. Clearly there are major differences
in worship and beliefs, and there is the association of Muslims with
terrorism. All these causes exaggerate differences and create misper-
ceptions that can lead to fear or devaluation of a people.27
This dialectic between the disempowered native and the “invader”

is well described in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth:
The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native

town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill
fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters lit-
tle where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a
world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and
their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hun-
gry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The na-
tive town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing
in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs.28
The Hobbesian culture of anarchy, imported into Iraq through the

invasion and the licentious power thus unleashed, also made possible
the kind of sexual humiliation the Iraqi prisoners had to endure.
Ultimately, at Abu Ghraib, the ideology of anti-Semitic racism invent-
ed in Central and Western Europe, and more systematically in

Germany, from the 1840s onwards, came full cycle. True, the system at
Abu Ghraib was different from the ones in Dachau and Birkenau, es-
pecially in terms of the quantity of people tortured and killed. But I
find it much harder to establish a strict ideological boundary between
the racism intrinsic to Nazism and the kind of nihilistic racism per-
meating the mindset of some segments of the political elites governing
the United States.
Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist of The New Yorker, re-
vealed that the attitude that “Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sex-
ual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington
conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.”
Hersh argued further, that the U.S. neocons learned of such “vulnera-
bility” from a book entitled The Arab Mind authored by the Israeli cul-
tural anthropologist Raphael Patai in 1973. According to an academic
quoted by Hersh, the Patai book was “the bible of the neocons on Arab
behavior.” In the discussions of the neocons, two themes emerged:
“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest
weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”29
I found it hard not to link these attitudes to the Pride and
Ego–Down Approach “legitimately” employed by U.S. interrogators in
order to “break” their detainees which I have sketched above:
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious
goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed
photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—
including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the
shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant
said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an
army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.”
The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and
gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant
said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.31
I am conscious that one has to be very careful with sources that re-
main unnamed, especially when they are cited by journalists. But I
have decided to use this material, because in this specific case there is
enough independent evidence to support the type of racist attitude I
am trying to explain. Consider this account of Brigadier General Janis
L. Karpinski given during an interview conducted at Camp Doha on
February 15, 2004:
It became sport....[E]ven saying this makes me feel sick to my stom-
ach, but, they were enjoying what they were doing and the MPs who
saw this opportunity—seized the opportunity....I would imagine...it
went something like this—in the DFAC or when they were sitting
around the Internet Café. “Oh yeah, you should see what we do to the
prisoners sometime.” “Can I come over and watch?” “Oh yeah. How
about Thursday.” And because we had a clerk over there who was thor-
oughly enjoying all of this sport, and the pictures anyway, and she was
the girlfriend of the guy who was one of the kingpins in this. We had a
guy from the maintenance who must have been one of the invited par-
ticipants and—these are bad people. That was the first time I knew that
they would do such a thing as to bring a dog handler in there to use for
interrogation.32
Other insidious examples include incidents when detainees were

referred to as “Jihad Jerry,” “Gus,” “Shitboy,” “one of the three wise
men,” or when they were told to “curse” Islam. At Abu Ghraib, loyal-
ty to Islam was turned into an expedient vehicle to extract “critical in-
telligence” from detainees through psychological torture. In a memo-
randum, dated November 20, 2003, a “request for exception to CJTF
[Combined Joint Taskforce]-7 Interrogation and Counter Resistance
Policy” was made; essentially, a measure to extend the legal “bound-
aries” for the interrogations. The “subject” in this particular case was
a Syrian male and an “admitted foreign fighter who came to commit
Jihad against Coalition Forces in Iraq” and who was “captured in an
attempted IED [improvised explosive device] attack in Baghdad.” The
detainee is thought to be “at the point where he is resigned to the
hope that Allah will see him through this episode in his life, therefore
he feels no need to speak with interrogators.” He thus has to be “put
in a position where he will feel that the only option to get out of jail
is to speak with interrogators.”33 To that end,
interrogators will reinforce the fact that we have attempted to help him
time and time again and that they are now putting it in Allah’s hands.
Interrogators will at maximum throw tables, chairs, invade his person-
al space and continuously yell at the detainee. Interrogators will not
physically touch or harm the detainee...If the detainee has not broken
yet, interrogators will move into the segregation phase of the ap-
proach....During transportation, the Fear Up Harsh approach [see
above] will be continued, highlighting the Allah factor....MP working
dogs will be present and barking during this phase. Detainee will be
strip searched by guards with the empty sandbag over his head for the
safety of himself, prison guards, interrogators and other prisoners.
Interrogators will wait outside the room while detainee is strip
searched. Interrogators will watch from a distance while detainee is
placed in the segregation cell. Detainee will be put on the adjusted

sleep schedule...for 72 hours. Interrogations will be conducted contin-
uously during this 72 hour period. The approaches which will be used
during this phase will include, fear up harsh, pride and ego down, si-
lence and loud music. Stress positions will also be used in accordance
with CJTF-7 IROE in order to intensify this approach.34
In my opinion this passage links up with many arguments I have

tried to explain thus far: the technical language provides an example
for the type of “scientific torture” I have mentioned at the beginning
of the article; the fact that the detainee was not to be harmed physical-
ly, while being abused psychologically, links up to the “utopia” elabo-
rated by Foucault; the aim “to break the detainee” exemplifies the li-
centious character of power that can only be unleashed in a situation
where an invading army willfully creates an anarchic situation; and the
fact that dogs were employed and the constant reference to the “Allah
factor” further elaborates on the type of racist attitudes towards Arabs
and Muslims described by Seymour Hersh’s source cited above.
Yet I feel that I have to go beyond these examples in order to qual-
ify employing the term “culture,” for skeptics may argue that what I
have said thus far is confined to the combat situation in Iraq, to the
abominations intrinsic to war, to its perverse powers to suspend in-
saniyat, to violate us morally. I would like to draw the attention of
those readers to the writings of the best-selling columnist and author
Anne Coulter. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001,
Coulter bluntly advocated that the United States should “invade
[Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity.”35 She also suggested that since there “is nothing like hor-
rendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. . . a couple of well aimed
nuclear weapons” can transform “Islamic fanatics” into “gentle little
lambs.”36 There are many other examples that we can refer to: the al-
lusion to a nuclear war “that might end up displacing Mecca and
Medina with two large radioactive craters” made by Fred Ikle, who
was U.S. undersecretary of defense during the Reagan administra-
tion;37 the suggestion of Louisiana Republican John Cooksey that any
airline passenger wearing a “diaper on his head” should be “pulled
over”; and the assertion of the late Jerry Falwell on 60 Minutes that
“Muhammad was a terrorist” and that he was “a violent man, a man
of war.”38
Academics and journalists function as complicit narrators of the
type of racist culture I am discussing. Consider a symposium orga-
nized by the American Enterprise Institute in March 2006. At this oc-

casion, Pierre Rehov (a French filmmaker), Nancy Kobrin (an affiliat-
ed professor to the University of Haifa), Peter Raddatz (a German
“scholar” of Islamic studies and the coauthor of the Encyclopaedia of
Islam), and Gudrun Eussner (a journalist specializing in mass com-
munication, political science, and Iranian philology), dwelled on the
“Muslim rape epidemic that is sweeping Europe and over many other
nations host to immigrants from the Islamic world.” In the written in-
troduction to the symposium, the organizers stated that the “direct
connection between the rapes and Islam is irrefutable, as Muslims are
significantly overrepresented among convicted rapists and rape sus-
pects. The Muslim perpetrators themselves boast that their crime is
justified,” it is claimed, “since their victims were, among other things,
not properly veiled.”39 Of course, there is no supporting material giv-
en, no court proceedings, not even a single statement. Instead, one of
the participants offered the following “explanation”:
[Islam’s] biologistic “thinking” demands the “pure” man as the real
human dominating the “impure” woman as a lower form, rather close
to some animal-like existence. Therefore, sexuality cannot be sublimat-
ed and has to serve—aside from ramifications into homo-, paedo- and
sodo-variants—a basic double function: fertilizing and punishing.40
Citing a book by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson entitled

Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode
Animal Behavior, another participant linked the behavior of “Arab
Muslim boys” to that of dogs:
In my work on Islamic suicide terrorism, I have noted that the rage is
really against the prenatal Muslim mother, misdirected to the infidels
who represent her in the jihadi mind’s eye. Interestingly enough,
Grandin also notes that “humans have neotenized dogs: without realiz-
ing it, humans have bred dogs to stay immature for their entire lives.”
(p. 86) I would substitute the word “bred” for concepts like child-rear-
ing practices, etc. And raise the question as can it be that Arab Muslim
boys turned rapists have been “neotenized,” that is raised to stay im-
mature for their entire lives?41
Suddenly, now that we have delved into the narratives constituting

it, it is that much easier to place Abu Ghraib within the cultural cur-
rent that I have tried to explain in this article. I found it also easier to
explain the types of torture employed by the U.S. Army, for if film-
makers and scholars seriously discuss how the behavior of Arab-

Muslim men can be linked to that of dogs, it is that much easier to in-
terpret why U.S. soldiers can participate in sodomizing Iraqis with
chemical lights, beat them, or force them to perform homosexual acts.
If educated “experts,” invited by a prominent U.S. think tank that
hosts influential neoconservative “strategists” such as Joshua
Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, and Patrick Clawson, quite “rationally”
dehumanize “Arab-Muslims,” what can we expect from U.S. soldiers,
many of whom are convicted criminals who see the army as the last
option to earn a living?
I fail to establish a firm boundary between the “scientific racism”
displayed at conferences like the one mentioned above, and the jingo-
istic racism of Sergeant Smith, a MP dog handler at Abu Ghraib, who
seriously stated that “the dogs came not to like Iraqi detainees. They
didn’t like the Iraqi culture, smell, sound, skin tone, hair color, or any-
thing about them.”42 I could go on giving more and more examples, not
in order to suggest that contemporary America is a singularly violent
or brutal society, not in order to substitute “their” racism, with “our”
prejudices, not in order to perpetuate yet another us versus them di-
chotomy. The purpose of this article is not ideological mobilization.
Indeed, one of the reasons why there is so much published material
available on the torture at Abu Ghraib is because U.S. society has em-
powered itself to guarantee a certain degree of transparency in the po-
litical process of the country (in the face of the most resourceful state
in the world). But the topic of this essay was not if and how U.S. civ-
il society could affect the foreign policies of the state, a topic worth
exploring systematically. Rather, I wanted to show how a particular
cultural current, which has gained impetus in the aftermath of the ter-
rorist attacks on September 11, 2001, made possible the torture at Abu
Ghraib and how the events there cannot be detached from a new vari-
ant of anti-Semitic reasoning that continues to have a presence in the
imagined “Western consciousness.” It is in this sense that I believe
that Western anti-Semitism has come full cycle: from the annihilation
of the Jews to the dehumanization of the Muslims.
I am conscious that some may say that such a grand statement is
“pretentious” at best, “ideological” at worst. But that, in my opinion,
is characteristic of the present international political culture, in which
any criticism of the atrocities committed in the name of freedom (or
Allah for that matter) is marginalized and considered to be hypocriti-
cal, unpatriotic, or idealistic. Thus, I feel that it is one of the primary
duties of scholars of contemporary Western Asia to record and cri-

tique what has happened here in the past decades, to foster a new crit-
ical consciousness that can stand firm against the present dominant
culture, which considers systematic intellectual criticism inappropri-
ate and doomed from the outset. Ultimately, the purpose of this type
of critique is narrowing the gap between bashariyat and insaniyat, be-
tween our humanness and humaneness, between the mere biological
attributes which make us all members of the human race, and the kind
of humane attributes that we need to aspire to—in the name of peace,
in the name of freedom, in the name of the numerous people maimed
and tortured in the dungeons of the agents of power, whose crimes we
must oppose all over the world.
Notes
1. See Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, The International Politics of the Persian Gulf (London:
Routledge, 2006), and especially Iran in World Politics (London: Hurst & Co., 2007),
chapter 2.
2. Here I am using the term employed by Jalal Al-e Ahmad in his best-selling Gharbzadegi
or “Westtoxification.” See his Plagued by the West (Gharbzadegi), (New York:
Caravan, 1982).
3. Recently, there has emerged more critical material on this. See especially, Richard
Jackson, “Language, policy and the construction of a torture culture in the war on ter-
rorism,” Review of International Studies 33, no. 3 (July 2007): 353–71, and Alex Belamy,
“No Pain, No Gain?” International Affairs 82, no. 1 (2006): 121–48.
4. Susan Sontag, “What have we done?,”The Guardian, May 24, 2004.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991), 8, 14.
6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 11.
7. “No Blood, No Foul,” Human Rights Watch 18, no. 3 (July 2006): 30, http://hrw.org.
8. http://www.thelancet.com. See also Sandro Contenta, “US Doctors Tied to Prisoner
Abuse Faked Death Certificates,” Toronto Star, August 20, 2004.
9. “The Taguba Report” in Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture
Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 416, http://news.findlaw.com.
See also Mark Danner, Torture and Truth (London: Granta, 2004), and Jennifer K.
Harbury, Truth, Torture and the American Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).
10. “Taguba Report,” Torture Papers, 416.
11. See Seymour Hersh, “The General’s Report,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2007,
http://www.newyorker.com.
12. “The ICRC Report” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers, 393, emphasis
added, http://www.globalsecurity.org.
13. “The Schlesinger Report” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers, 909, em-
phasis added, http://www.globalsecurity.org.
14. “The Fay-Jones Report: Investigation of Intelligence Activities at Abu Ghraib, August
2004,” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers, 989, emphasis added,
http://fl1.findlaw.com; 1074–76.
15. “The Mikolashek Report” in Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, 851, 853–54.
16. “Mikolashek Report,” The Torture Papers, 635.

17. The report is available in Greenberg and Dratel, The Torture Papers, 1132–64.
18. See further Adib-Moghaddam, Iran in World Politics, chapter three.
19. Joseph Massad, “Imperial Mementos,” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 691, May 20–26, 2004,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg. On the linkage between imperialism and desire see also
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), especially 187 ff. or Robert C.
Young, “Colonialism and the Desiring Machine” in Gregory Castle, ed., Postcolonial
Discourses (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 74–98.
20. Ali Shariati, “Humanity and Islam” in Charles Kuzman, ed., Liberal Islam (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 188–89.
21. Shariati, “Humanity and Islam,” 188, emphasis added.
22. See Adib-Moghaddam, Iran in World Politics, introduction and chapter 1.
23. “No Blood, No Foul,” Human Rights Watch, 14–15.
24. See R. Jeffrey Smith, “Hussein’s Pre-war ties with al-Qaeda discounted,” The
Washington Post, April 6, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com. The declassified re-
port and documents are available at http://www.dodig.osd.mil.
25. See also Edward Said, Covering Islam (London: Vintage, 1997); Emran Qureshi and
Michael A. Sells, eds., The New Crusades (New York: Columbia UP, 2003); and Arshin
Adib-Moghaddam, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations (forthcoming).
26. “No Blood, No Foul,” Human Rights Watch, 34.
27. “The Taguba Report” in Greenberg and Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers, 448–49.
28. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963) 40.
29. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” The New Yorker, May 24, 2004,
http://www.newyorker.com.
30. Hersh, “The Gray Zone,” see also Trish Schuh, “Racism and Religious Desecration as
U.S. Policy,” Counterpunch, 6/7 (May 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org.
32. “Taguba Report (Annex),” Torture Papers, 530–31.
33. “Taguba Report (Annex),” Torture Papers, 466, 472, 524.
34. “Taguba Report (Annex),” Torture Papers, 467.
35. Anne Coulter, “This is War,” National Review Online, September 13, 2001,
http://www.nationalreview.com. This article lead to Coulter’s dismissal from the
National Review. Her commentaries continue to be published at
FrontPageMagazine.com.
36. Ann Coulter, “Why We Hate Them,” in Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The
Iraq War Reader (London: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 333. The article originally ap-
peared at FrontPageMagazine.com on September 26, 2003.
37. Fred Ikle, “Stopping the Next Sept. 11,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2002.
38. Later, Falwell apologized for the remarks. See “Jerry Falwell Apologizes for
Mohammad Criticism,” Reuters, October 12, 2002.
39. “Symposium: To Rape an Unveiled Woman,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 7, 2006.
40. “Symposium,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 7, 2006
41. “Symposium,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 7, 2006
42. “Taguba Report,” Torture Papers, 449.
Self-Sourcing
How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay!
MARTHA E. GIMENEZ
The expansion of the capitalist world economy, which accelerated af-

ter the fall of the socialist bloc, has produced everywhere drastic
changes in the division of labor, occupational structure, and the quality
and quantity of labor that is in demand. In the United States, public
awareness about the causes of job losses (downsizing, capital flight, off-
shoring, and outsourcing) has vastly increased since it became widely
known that these processes caused the loss not only of blue-collar but
also of “middle-class” and “upper-middle-class” jobs; i.e., jobs requir-
ing some degree of education and technical competence.
Politicians, academics, the media, and job seekers focus on downsiz-
ing, offshoring, and outsourcing as the main causes of unemployment
and declining opportunities, even for college graduates. They neglect,
however, the impact of self-sourcing, a term I apply to the complex and
relatively unnoticed effects of the radical reorganization of our working
and non-working time due to the widespread use of information tech-
nologies. In this essay, I will explore the significance of self-sourcing,
which I define as the intensification of the process of transferring work
from the sphere of production, where it is visible and paid, to the sphere
of consumption, where it is invisible and unpaid. This process is not
new and it is commonly understood as self-service. It is my contention
that self-sourcing signals a qualitative change in the forces and the rela-
tions of production, consumption, and circulation, which merits theo-
retical and empirical investigation.
Self-sourcing is a relatively unnoticed basis for the growth of busi-
ness profits even as average wages and salaries decline; it is an impor-
tant contributor to unemployment and underemployment. Consump-
tion increasingly requires the performance of tasks previously done by
paid workers. Jobs are not disappearing just because of automation,
downsizing, and outsourcing; they disappear because they are increas-
ingly done without pay by millions of consumers while the people who
previously held those low-paid service and clerical jobs find them-
selves unemployed and perhaps unemployable.
M ARTHA E. G IMENEZ teaches sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
37
I first became interested in these issues when, in the mid-1980s, the

university where I worked subsidized the faculty’s purchase of person-
al computers, a practice that still continues. As computers were quite
expensive in those days, I wondered about the reasons for the universi-
ty’s decision. True, computer use enhanced faculty productivity, as
word processing accelerated the writing process. Computers were fun
to use and quickly become addictive, the source of a new “trained inca-
pacity” which made previous forms of writing seem clumsy and cum-
bersome. More importantly, the use of computers changed the organi-
zation of intellectual production and the conditions for the reproduc-
tion of intellectual labor power. Computers created the need to use
them and increased the ability of one person to do many things which,
in “the old days,” would have been time consuming and would have re-
quired the labor of staff workers. Faculty members were not given paid
time off to retool themselves; instead, they spent a great deal of their
theoretically “free” time learning new skills and reproducing their labor
power at higher and higher levels of competence. Through speedup,
they increased their future productivity on a scale that would have been
difficult to attain without having access to research funds, research as-
sistants, and secretaries. It also became easier for faculty to use the com-
puter for all the paper work associated with teaching (e.g., bibliogra-
phies, memos for students and colleagues, syllabi, letters, book re-
quests, handouts for students, exams, etc.) than to type or write by
hand a draft to be typed by department secretaries.
In the last twenty-five years, computers have become smaller, ubiq-
uitous, inexpensive, and far more efficient. Faculty have become their
own typists, secretaries, research assistants, computer experts (to some
extent), and webmasters; they hold virtual office hours, teach virtual
courses, and increasingly incorporate information technologies in the
classroom. The ease with which computers have become integrated in
the processes of intellectual production and teaching masks the inter-
mingling between professional and clerical work. The consumption of
information technologies by faculty has long-term implications not on-
ly for their overall productivity but also for the employment of non-fac-
ulty personnel at the university. Faculty have taken on some of the work
formerly done by research and teaching assistants, secretaries, typists,
data analysts, work-study students, proofreaders, library employees,
and others I may not have thought about. The transfer of unpaid cleri-
cal labor to the faculty is irreversible, and its quantity varies with the
relative power of individuals and departments. These two kinds of la-
S E L F - S O U R C I N G 39
bor, unpaid clerical labor and paid professional labor, are inextricably
combined and may not appear as separate domains in the consciousness
of most faculty who simply enjoy their self-sufficiency and the ease with
which work is done, without reflecting about the kind and quantity of
work they do. These observations, which relate the use of computers to
a process of speedup or intensification of professional labor via its com-
bination with labor previously done by clerical workers and graduate
students in various capacities, might be received with derision, as man-
ifestations of elitism. What is at issue, however, is not what is proper or
improper work for somebody with a PhD, but the implications of these
changes for the skills, wages, and employment of staff workers. Speedup
for the faculty means that, though their job description does not openly
state it, they are now expected to perform a variable quantity of unrec-
ognized and unpaid computer-related clerical labor which expands
their working day without expanding their paychecks. Faculty speedup,
as well as the speedup inherent in most clerical jobs, also means long-
term changes in the employment prospects for people who, given their
levels of education and training, can only aspire to middle- and low-lev-
el clerical employment.
An examination of self-sourcing in the context of educational insti-
tutions is a good starting point for theorizing the nature of this phe-
nomenon. It is, in some ways, an extension of the now familiar practices
of self-service and do-it-yourself, and the uncritical acceptance of the
work entailed in many instances of consumption. While these practices
are not new, in creating the concept of self-sourcing I want to call at-
tention to the qualitative changes in the amount of work required by
consumption. Feminists have called attention to the ways capital bene-
fits from women’s unpaid labor within and outside the household.1
Others have written about the increase in household production, where
mostly male unpaid labor enters in the process of delivery and assembly
of unfinished goods and materials used in building, remodeling, repair-
ing, and so forth.2 But the development of online shopping for goods and
services, and online self-management of finances, employment benefits,
health insurance, etc. have taken self-service to a different plane.
Cumbersome and maddening phone menus were an early stage in the
process of replacing the paid labor of customer service employees with
standardized information often irrelevant to the callers’ problems.
Phone menus are still there but increasingly direct people to Web sites
where they can find or do what they need by themselves, without the
paid labor of someone guiding them through the process.
I still refuse to get an ATM card, because there are people, mostly
working women, who need jobs at the bank; and it is only recently that
I learned how to pump gas into my car because I thought the teenager
who did it needed the job. Now the service station, recently purchased
by BP, charges $2.50 for full-service. But these, as well as the salad bars
and self-service supermarkets, are the earliest forms of a process of trans-
formation in the consumption process which increasingly demands more
unpaid work from the consumer while jobs quietly disappear.
Supermarkets are now diminishing the number of cashiers while replac-
ing them with self-checking machines. Consumers now work not only as
they select their groceries but as they bag and check them out, guided by
a creepy mechanical voice that instructs them how to do it in alignment
with the machine’s requirements. Self-service check-in machines are not
just in the airports (where passengers, after purchasing tickets online,
pay for and receive boarding passes from a machine), but in hotel lobbies
(where they dispense room keys and can be used by customers to check
themselves out), theater lobbies, the post office, and, increasingly, in
most settings where consumers do what was previously done by paid
workers. The last time I traveled by air, the airline employee wanted me
(and other passengers as well) to print the baggage claim and attach it to
the suitcase! We, the passengers, had no idea how to do it and we had
to complain loudly until someone finally took care of our luggage.
The growth of self-service online transactions covering every conceiv-
able consumer need, the use of self-service kiosks in large, big box stores,
and the technological upgrading of self-service everywhere can be expe-
rienced as fun and self-empowering. The concept of self-sourcing, how-
ever, calls attention to the actual significance of these applications of in-
formation technologies; they not only restructure occupations through
the blurring of job descriptions but displace paid labor with unpaid la-
bor. The fact that this unpaid labor is, depending on the context, blend-
ed in with paid labor (as in the case of teachers), or of such short dura-
tion as to be practically invisible, just one more aspect of a pleasurable
consumption experience, obscures its significance as a source of
profits—corporations and businesses of all sizes save money when they
cut labor costs by having the consumers’ unpaid labor replace the paid
labor of retail clerks, cashiers, travel agents, hotel clerks, bank clerks, etc.
While the unpaid labor time of each consumer is minimal, adding up the
unpaid labor time of millions of consumers yields substantial cuts in la-
bor costs for businesses, who see their profits grow through their appro-
priation of unpaid consumption labor.
S E L F - S O U R C I N G 41
It may be argued that the lost jobs, which are generally low-skill,
low-paid jobs, should not be saved, and that automation opens up jobs
with higher skills and better pay. Those better jobs, however, are usual-
ly beyond the skills of those who self-sourcing technology replaces and
a large proportion is likely to be outsourced to countries where labor is
cheaper. While the process of self-sourcing is irreversible, it should not
be accepted uncritically. Self-sourcing is an important aspect of the
“hollowing out” of the job market, which entails the creation of jobs at
the top and the bottom of the occupational structure, while the jobs in
the middle are increasingly outsourced, or self-sourced.
Consumers do not know that they are doing more than just con-
suming goods and services: they are working without pay, entering in-
to relations of circulation and distribution independent of their will
and outside their consciousness of themselves as free, self-empowered
consumers. If the trend of the future is, as Scott Burns suggested, for
consumers to do more of the producers’ work, it is important to raise
awareness of the productive moment of consumption or “productive
consumption.” 3 While it might provide “middle-class” consumers with
great satisfactions, it turns them into a vast reservoir of unpaid workers
who contribute to capital accumulation while consciously reproducing
themselves as consumers and objectively reproducing themselves as un-
paid workers. At the same time large numbers of working-class people
fall between the cracks of the system, condemned to menial, poorly paid
jobs, permanent underemployment, or unemployment.
Notes
1. See, for example, Nona Glazer, “Servants to Capital,” Review of Radical Political
Economics 16, no. 1 (1984): 61–87, and Martha E. Gimenez, “The Dialectics of Waged
and Unwaged Work,” in Jane L. Collins and Martha Gimenez, eds., Work Without
Wages (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990).
2. See, for example, Scott Burns, The Household Economy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1977).
3. For an illuminating discussion of the dialectical relationship between production and
consumption see Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New
York: International Publishers, 1970), 193–99.
EXCHANGE
On the History of Imperialism Theory

RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY
In his illuminating survey, “The Imperialist World System: Paul

Baran’s Political Economy of Growth After Fifty Years” (Monthly
Review, May 2007), John Bellamy Foster remarks that “The concept of
the imperialist world system in today’s predominant sense of the ex-
treme economic exploitation of periphery by center, creating a widen-
ing gap between rich and poor countries. . . . had its genesis in the
1950s, especially with the publication fifty years ago of Paul Baran’s
Political Economy of Growth.” While acknowledging that traces of
such a concept could be found in Marx and Lenin, he feels that “The
classical Marxist approach to the worldwide spread of capitalist rela-
tions has often been characterized as a crude theory of linear stages of
development” whereby the less developed countries would necessar-
ily traverse the same path as the more developed ones. Among the ad-
herents to this view Foster includes Marxists in the Second and Third
Internationals.
While we agree that this view was—and remains—a powerful and
baneful influence, it cannot be ascribed to the Third International (the
Communist International, or Comintern) as a whole. Neither the
Bolsheviks, nor the Comintern which they set up, nor Mao and the
Communist Party of China (CPC) under his leadership, subscribed to
a crude linear theory. Indeed, they pioneered the theory of imperial-
ism, including the analysis of the specific social formations generated
by imperialism in the colonies and semicolonies. This is of course in
no way to diminish Baran’s distinct contributions, which are outlined
by Foster.
The Bolsheviks’ Conception of Imperialism
Marxist anti-imperialism, worldwide, virtually was born with the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.1 The Russian proletariat seized power in
RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY (RUPE) is based in Mumbai, India. The unit
publishes the journal Aspects of India’s Economy and a range of research publications
in English and Hindi. RUPE’s Behind the Invasion of Iraq (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2003), written prior to the U.S. invasion of that country, is still an extremely valu-
able source on the current war.
42
E X C H A N G E 43
an imperialist country, and was immediately confronted by the armies

of the imperialist powers. Thus the Bolsheviks viewed their revolution
as forcing the first breach in the fortress of imperialism. But further,
they proclaimed their “firm determination to wrest mankind from the
clutches of finance capital” and insisted on “a complete break with the
barbarous policy of bourgeois civilization, which has built the pros-
perity of the exploiters belonging to a few chosen nations on the en-
slavement of hundreds of millions of working people in Asia, in the
colonies in general, and in the small countries” (“Declaration of Rights
of the Working and Exploited People,” January 16, 1918). This stance
gave enormous impetus to anti-imperialist movements worldwide and
thus dealt a great blow to imperialism. Moreover, the Bolshevik victo-
ry in the Civil War demonstrated that imperialist armies could be de-
feated by an oppressed people. The reverberations of the Bolshevik
Revolution were felt in the May Fourth Movement in China (1919), the
anti-Rowlatt Act agitation in India (1919), and the revolt in Iraq (1920),
to take just three examples.
In Lenin’s keen dialectical view, imperialism did play a dual role in
the colonies and dependent countries, but that role was not—as the
linear-stage theorists would have it—one of dissolving the earlier so-
cial basis there and initiating capitalist development as such. Rather,
it was, on the one hand, of despoiling and plundering these countries,
and, on the other, of drawing them into international politics, and
thus hastening the independent activity of their peoples in the fight to
overthrow international imperialism. By 1919, he characterized the ap-
proach of the world revolution as one in which “the civil war of the
working people against the imperialists and exploiters in all the ad-
vanced countries is beginning to be combined with national wars
against international imperialism.”2
He noted that the tasks of the communists of the “imperialist-op-
pressed countries” were “still greater and newer” than those of the
Bolsheviks: “you are confronted with a task which has not previously
confronted the Communists of the world”—linking the awakening
bourgeois nationalism in those countries, which was historically justi-
fied, with the international revolution. “You will have to tackle that
problem and solve it through your own independent experience.”3
Indeed the theory of imperialism was to develop in the closest associ-
ation with the fierce anti-imperialist struggle.
The Comintern’s View

Though the Third International was formed at Lenin’s initiative at
a time (1919) when proletarian revolution in Europe, rather than anti-
imperialist revolution in the colonies, was on the immediate agenda,
it accorded high priority to the anti-imperialist struggle. Lenin pre-
sented his “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” at the
Second Congress (1920) himself. Far from maintaining that imperial-
ism would spread the same social relations in the colonies/semi-
colonies as developed in England under the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, the Comintern maintained that imperialism blocked social
development by preventing the completion of the bourgeois revolu-
tionary tasks (that is, the economic, social, and political changes
wrought by the people of the capitalist countries in the course of over-
throwing feudal rule). This is precisely why various Comintern con-
gresses, starting with the Second Congress, called for the communist
parties of colonial and semicolonial countries to press for the comple-
tion of those tasks.4 At the same time, the Comintern explicitly did not
assume that the bourgeois democratic revolutionary tasks would have
to be accomplished under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. (We will
return to this point later.)
At its Second Congress, the Comintern adopted “Supplementary
Theses” to Lenin’s theses, describing the distorted pattern of devel-
opment in the colonies:
Foreign imperialism, imposed on the eastern peoples, prevented them
from developing socially and economically side by side with their fel-
lows in Europe and America. Owing to the imperialist policy of pre-
venting industrial development in the colonies, a proletarian class, in
the strict sense of the word, could not come into existence here until
recently. The indigenous craft industries were destroyed to make room
for the products of the centralised industries in the imperialistic coun-
tries—consequently a majority of the population was driven to the land
to produce foodgrains and raw materials for export to foreign
lands. . . . Foreign domination has obstructed the free development of
the social forces, therefore its overthrow is the first step towards a rev-
olution in the colonies.5
Indeed, the Comintern later argued that it was only with the weak-
ening of the imperialist bonds that even limited growth of productive
forces took place in the colonies:
It is precisely this [post–First World War] weakening of imperialist pres-

sure in the colonies, together with the increasing rivalry between various
E X C H A N G E 45
imperialist groups, that has facilitated the development of native capital-

ism in the colonies and semicolonial countries which are outgrowing the
narrow framework of the domination of the imperialist great powers. . . . 6
Incidentally, this passage anticipates a point later made in the “de-

velopment of underdevelopment” thesis.7
Documents of the Comintern Congresses repeatedly stressed that
imperialism allied with the most backward, feudal, reactionary ele-
ments for both political and economic reasons. The “foreign imperial-
ists in all the backward countries convert the feudal (and partly also
the semifeudal, semibourgeois) upper classes of native society into
agents of their domination.” “Vitally interested in securing the greatest
profits with the least expenditure of capital, imperialism strives all it
can to maintain in the backward countries the feudal usurious form of
exploiting labor power.”8
The Comintern’s views were most elaborately expressed in 1928 in
its Sixth Congress “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the
Colonies and Semi-Colonies.” Since the text is too long to reproduce,
we shall summarize some of its significant points.
(1) While the colonies suffer pains similar to those of early capital-
ist development, they experience none of the progressive results.
Whereas capitalist development develops productive forces, colonial
forms of capitalist exploitation transfer surplus value to the metropolis
and hinder the development of productive forces. There is a limited de-
velopment of production (note: not “productive forces”) in the
colonies, to the extent required by the metropolis. Infrastructure is cre-
ated for the same purpose. The colonial country is compelled to sacri-
fice the interests of its independent development to become an ap-
pendage of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Imperialism is parasitic.
(2) New crops and new systems of irrigation are introduced in place
of those destroyed by colonial policy, in order to widen the raw mate-
rial base for imperialism. While agricultural production is geared to-
ward export, its precapitalist features are preserved, given monetary
expression, and subordinated to finance capital. The drawing of the
village into the sphere of monetary and trading economy leads to pau-
perization; since there is no industrial development, it does not lead to
proletarianization. This creates extraordinary “pressure on agricul-
ture,” resulting in agrarian immigration, rack-renting, and fragmenta-
tion. Usury is added to the burdens of the peasantry. Agriculture wit-
nesses a simultaneous fall in productivity and in demand for labor
power. Peasants are unable to raise their technical and organizational
level because direct exploitation and unequal exchange leave them no

surplus. Big land ownership does not take the form of large-scale agri-
culture—just extortion of rent from a large number of peasants.
(3) Mineral wealth is exploited for the needs of the metropolis.
Colonial production does not carry out all the stages of manufacture,
but is limited to individual branches of industry. Real industrializa-
tion, in particular the building of a flourishing engineering industry
which might make possible independent development, is hindered by
the metropolis. The equilibrium of separate branches of production is
destroyed. The colonial country is forced to give up independent de-
velopment to become an appendage of foreign capitalism.
(4) The poverty of the peasantry denotes a crisis in the internal
market for industry, which in turn represents a powerful obstacle to
capitalist development. Instead of the development of a national in-
ternal market, the scattered internal colonial trade is adapted to the
needs of export.
Few would claim the Comintern as a whole, and all its important
functionaries, were always consistent in their views, or free from er-
rors. Yet the Comintern’s role in developing the theory of imperialism
can hardly be overlooked.
A Bourgeoisie Incapable of Leading a Bourgeois Revolution
As the theoretician of the twentieth century’s most important rev-
olution in an “imperialist-oppressed country,” Mao Zedong had to
confront and grapple with the social formation in China generated by
imperialism. He noted that “As China’s feudal society had developed
a commodity economy, and so carried within itself the seeds of capi-
talism, China would of herself have developed slowly into a capitalist
society even without the impact of foreign capitalism.”9 No doubt pen-
etration by imperialism helped disintegrate China’s social economy,
and gave rise to certain objective conditions and possibilities for the
development of capitalist production in China; but this was only one
aspect of the change it wrought. The other aspect was that imperial-
ism colluded with feudal forces to arrest the development of Chinese
capitalism. Mao characterized the stage of social development of
China as distinct from that of both feudalism and capitalism; he
termed it “semifeudal, semicolonial.”
In 1926 itself, in his “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,”
Mao laid out the distinct typology of classes found in such a society.
The ruling classes of China, that is, the landlord class and the com-
E X C H A N G E 47
prador class, were appendages of the international bourgeoisie; they

“hinder[ed] the development of productive forces.” Particularly sig-
nificant was his division of the Chinese bourgeoisie into two sections,
“comprador” and “national,” which according to him roughly corre-
sponded to the “big bourgeoisie” and the “middle bourgeoisie.” The
comprador class is “a class which directly serves the capitalists of the
imperialist countries and is nurtured by them; countless ties link it
closely with the feudal forces in the countryside.” The national bour-
geoisie, on the other hand, though stifled by imperialism, is weak and
flabby, and vacillates between fighting imperialism and fighting the
revolution.
One would expect the bourgeois democratic revolution to be led by
the bourgeoisie. But in China, the most powerful section of the bour-
geoisie was in fact set against the bourgeois democratic revolution,
and was one of the main targets of the revolution. The other section
was incapable of leading it.
From the late 1920s, a further development took place within the
comprador bourgeoisie of China: the top section developed a peculiar
form of monopoly capital, linked to the levers of state power (in a
manner which recalled the precapitalist monopolies).10 In “The Present
Situation and Our Tasks” (1947), Mao refers to the “four big families”
who have “monopolized the economic lifelines of the whole country.
This monopoly capital, combined with state power, has become state-
monopoly capitalism. This monopoly capitalism, closely tied up with
foreign imperialism, the domestic landlord class and the old-type rich
peasants, has become comprador, feudal, state-monopoly capital-
ism. . . .This capitalist class, known as the bureaucrat-capitalist class,
is the big bourgeoisie of China.”11
Baran’s characterization of the classes through which foreign capi-
tal exercises control over the underdeveloped countries has much in
common with Mao’s:
first. . . a group of merchants expanding and thriving within the orbit of
foreign capital. . . . secondly the native industrial monopolists. . .who en-
tirely depend on the maintenance of the existing economic structure,
and whose monopolistic status would be swept away by the rise of in-
dustrial capitalism. . . .The interests of these two groups run entirely
parallel with those of the feudal landowners powerfully entrenched in
the societies of the backward areas. . . .What results is a political and
social coalition of wealthy compradors, powerful monopolists, and
large landowners dedicated to the defense of the existing feudal-mer-
cantile order. . . . this coalition has nothing to hope for from the rise of
industrial capitalism which would dislodge it from its positions of priv-

ilege and power.12
Bourgeois-Democratic Tasks, Proletarian Leadership

The path of revolution in such societies must differ from that in cap-
italist societies. What was needed was an analysis in the true spirit of
Marx, one that both upheld the laws of historical development and ful-
ly embraced historical contingency. Thus neither the Bolsheviks nor
Mao thought that a “bourgeois revolution” was necessary in the form
of a revolution led by the bourgeoisie. Rather, the Comintern provided
for, and Mao insisted on the necessity of, the bourgeois democratic rev-
olution being completed under the leadership of the proletariat. In dis-
cussing his draft theses in 1920, Lenin stated:
The question was posed as follows: are we to consider as correct the as-
sertion that the capitalist stage of economic development is inevitable
for backward nations now on the road to emancipation and among
whom a certain advance towards progress is to be seen since the war?
We replied in the negative. If the victorious revolutionary proletariat
conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet govern-
ments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal—in that
event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must in-
evitably go through the capitalist stage of development. . . .with the aid
of the proletariat of the advanced countries, backward countries can go
over to the Soviet system and, through certain stages of development,
to communism, without having to pass through the capitalist stage.
By the Fourth Congress this was more explicit:

The objective tasks of colonial revolutions exceed the limit of bourgeois
democracy by the very fact that a decisive victory is incompatible with
the domination of world imperialism.13
While the 1928 “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the

Colonies and Semi-Colonies” state that the immediate goal in the rev-
olution is “to complete the bourgeois democratic revolution,” the very
first of the “general basic tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution
in the colonies and semicolonies” includes “overthrow of the power of
the exploiting classes at the back of which imperialism stands; orga-
nization of soviets of workers and peasants; establishment of the dic-
tatorship of the proletariat and peasantry; consolidation of the hege-
mony of the proletariat.” Thus the character of the revolution is bour-
geois-democratic in its tasks, but not in its leadership.
E X C H A N G E 49
Mao therefore referred to this as the new democratic revolution:

In this era, any revolution in a colony or semi-colony that is directed
against imperialism, i.e., against the international bourgeoisie or inter-
national capitalism, no longer comes within the old category of the
bourgeois-democratic world revolution, but within the new catego-
ry. . . . although its objective mission is to clear the path for the devel-
opment of capitalism, it is no longer a revolution of the old type led by
the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a
state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revo-
lution led by the proletariat with the aim, in the first stage, of estab-
lishing a new-democratic society and a state under the joint dictator-
ship of all the revolutionary classes. Thus this revolution actually serves
the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the development of so-
cialism.14
The principal bourgeois-democratic task, the axis of the entire rev-

olution, according to the Comintern and Mao, is the agrarian revolu-
tion. Of this Baran says:
if it [agrarian reform] comes about in spite of obstruction on the part of
such a government, as a result of overwhelming pressure of the peas-
antry—in other words, if it assumes the character of an agrarian revolu-
tion—it represents a major advance along the road to progress. Indeed,
it is indispensable in order to eliminate a parasitic landowning class and
to break its stranglehold on the life of an underdeveloped country. It is
indispensable in order to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the peas-
antry and to secure the foremost prerequisite of all economic and social
development: the release of the creative energies and potentialities of
the rural masses held down and crippled by centuries of degrading op-
pression and servitude. And it is indispensable because only through a
distribution of land among working peasants can the political and psy-
chological conditions be attained under which it is possible to approach
a rational solution of the agrarian problem: cooperative, technically ad-
vanced farms operated by free and equal producers.15
Later Baran refers again to “the agrarian revolution—bound to form

an integral part of the social revolution in most underdeveloped coun-
tries—splitting up large estates and abolishing rent payments by the
peasantry”16 as a necessary first step to socialism.
Baran thus integrated into his work the contributions of the
Comintern and Mao. But the historical context in which he wrote was
new: one in which, after the Second World War, colonialism was be-
ing replaced by neocolonialism, and this shift was being celebrated as

the “independence” of the third world. In the concrete conditions of
the 1950s, Baran showed how mere formal independence, in the ab-
sence of an alternative path of development, actually perpetuated the
subordination of these countries to imperialism. Crucially, the adop-
tion of such an alternative path depended on the correlation of class
forces in the country.
Notes
1. The focus of Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (published in mid-
1917) was on analyzing the nature of monopoly capital; its immediate context was the
imperialist world war. Hence it did not explore the impact of imperialism on the
colonies and semicolonies. However, it did refute the Second International miscon-
ception that capitalism would be evenly, steadily, and peacefully diffused worldwide;
and replaced it with the conception of a monopoly capital marked by sharply uneven
development, crisis, and predatory wars.
2. “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress of Communist Organizations of the
Peoples of the East,” November 22, 1919. In the same speech, he further says: “the so-
cialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletar-
ians in each country against their bourgeoisie—no, it will be a struggle of all the im-
perialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against inter-
national imperialism.”
3. Lenin, “Address to the Second All-Russia Congress.”
4. Doubtless there were several members of the Comintern who held the view that im-
perialism generated development, but it would not be fair to attribute to the
Comintern all the disparate views held by individual members. (For example, such
views apparently were debated in the 1928 congress, and defeated.) The congress doc-
uments are a more authoritative source.
5. “Supplementary Theses” to the Second Congress (1920) “Theses on the National and
Colonial Questions.”
6. Fourth Congress (1922) “Theses on the Eastern Question”; the same point is made in
Mao’s “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” (1939).
7. Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review,
September 1966.
8. Fourth Congress, “Theses on the Eastern Question.”
9. “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party,” Selected Works, vol. 2,
http://www.marxists.org.
10. See Ho Kan-Chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution (Peking, 1959), chap-
ter 7, section 2, for an account of the rise of this class.
11. Selected Works, vol. 4, http://www.marxists.org.
12. Political Economy of Growth, Indian edition, 231–32.
13. Fourth Congress “Theses on the Eastern Question.”
14. “On New Democracy,” Selected Works, vol. 2.
15. Baran, Political Economy of Growth, 202.
16. Baran, Political Economy of Growth, 312.
E X C H A N G E 51
Rediscovering the History of

Imperialism Theory: A Reply
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER
The Research Unit for Political Economy’s (RUPE’s) brief historical

account here of the origins of the Marxist theory of imperialism con-
stitutes a crucial corrective to common errors regarding that history.
In my article, “The Imperialist World System: Paul Baran’s Political
Economy of Growth After Fifty Years” (Monthly Review, May 2007), I
began by pointing out that Baran’s book was an outgrowth of classical
Marxist thought—the ideas of Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg. At the
same time it represented a sharp departure from the rigid orthodoxy
of linear development that had come to characterize so much of so-
cialist (as well as bourgeois) thought—often presented in terms of
Horace’s phrase, quoted by Marx, “the tale is told of you.” Baran’s
treatment of the imperialist world system was a startling contribution
at the time that his book appeared, challenging the conventional as-
sumptions of both the right and an increasingly calcified left.
Yet, as RUPE so clearly demonstrates, Baran’s argument can be seen
as having evolved out of earlier critiques of imperialism flowing out of
the Russian Revolution, the Comintern, and the Chinese Revolution.
Lenin and certain voices in the Comintern in the 1920s articulated
many of the same theses that Baran and those within the broad cur-
rent of dependency theory were to propound in the 1950s and ’60s.1
But these early contributions occurred in relation to what Stavrianos
in Global Rift was to call “The First Global Revolutionary Wave” in the
opening decades of the twentieth century and prior to “The Second
Global Revolutionary Wave” unleashed by the Second World War.2
Developing his ideas in the age of the Cold War, neocolonialism, and
the newly minted bourgeois economic development theory, and re-
sponding to the Chinese revolution, Baran gave the Marxist critique of
imperialism a more mature form. Drawing on insights from early so-
cialist planning, he demonstrated that the key strategic-economic is-
sue was the extent to which a society was able to mobilize its eco-
nomic surplus (both actual and potential) for its own ends.
RUPE rightly points out that Baran was strongly influenced by

Mao’s critique of imperialism—a point that I had overlooked in my ar-
ticle. Thus Baran quoted Mao’s statement that China would have de-
veloped into a capitalist society without foreign imperialism. Mao’s
understanding of the class-imperial dialectic in China clearly influ-
enced Baran’s treatment of the class dynamic in third world societies.3
The global ideological split in the Cold War years divided the
world not simply into two, but rather into three camps through the
growth of the nonaligned movement and the original idea of the
“Third World.” 4 The Second Global Revolutionary Wave gave new
concrete meaning to the theory of imperialism. During this period of
the fall of colonialism and the rise of neocolonialism, Baran’s far-reach-
ing critique of imperialism stood out, as RUPE observes, in its insis-
tence that any radical project had to be based on an alternative corre-
lation of class forces. Baran’s work thus stripped away imperialism’s
new clothes and pointed to the need for an uncompromising revolu-
tionary strategy.
For these reasons I think it is correct to conclude that the thesis
that imperialism impeded the development of third world social for-
mations, first introduced in the Comintern period, was articulated
most fully in the 1950s, leading to the development of a more coherent
Marxist theory of the imperialist world system, particularly in the
work of Baran and a young Samir Amin, who developed similar ideas
to those of Baran at about the same time.5
There can be little doubt that a radical rediscovery of the history of
imperialism theory is urgently needed today if we are to overcome the
enormous difficulties that now confront humanity in an age of re-
newed imperial assault. In this regard, RUPE’s short account of that
history here constitutes an indispensable starting point for further
analysis. As Baran wrote, “it was given only to Lenin [among Marx’s
early followers] to assimilate fully the essence of the Marxian method.
In analyzing imperialism and by grasping the crucial role played in it
by the awakening of the peoples inhabiting the colonial, dependent,
and underdeveloped countries, he brilliantly applied this method to
the reality of the twentieth century. The crisis of Marxism will be
overcome by further work in that tradition.”6
Notes
1. One early twentieth-century figure whose role in the development of imperialism the-
ory was important (although Baran was apparently unaware of his work) was, as I in-
dicated in my article, the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, who in the 1920s
E X C H A N G E 53
addressed the distorted development of Peru including its ecological aspects.

Mariátegui can be seen as standing in here for a whole host of anti-imperialist Marxist
thinkers in the third world in this period. See José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven
Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971).
2. L. S. Stavrianos, Global Rift (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1981).
3. Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1957), 162.
4. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: The New Press, 2007).
5. Amin wrote his doctoral dissertation, out of which his great work Accumulation on a
World Scale grew, in 1957, the same year that Baran published The Political Economy
of Growth. See Samir Amin, “Samir Amin (born 1931),” in Philip Arestis and Malcolm
Sawyer, ed. A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists (Northampton, MA:
Edward Elgar, 2000), 1–7; Amin, Accumulation on World Scale (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974).
6. Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 42.
MONTHLY REVIEW F i f t y Ye a r s A g o
Every ruling class has what the political philosophers call its arcanum dom-
inationis, its secret of power, and it is here that we approach that of the
American ruling class. The regulation of American political life—suppression
of the most important issues and management of the secondary ones—has
been achieved by an unwritten alliance between conservative Northern
Republicans and equally conservative Southern Democrats. With the some-
what doubtful exception of a few years in the first two Roosevelt administra-
tions, this alliance has worked smoothly and efficiently. . . .The linchpin of this
arrangement is the Southern oligarchy’s monopoly of political power in its
own region. And this in turn has depended on the disenfranchisement of
Southern Negroes and the division of the Southern working class into warring
black and white factions. . . .
There should be no illusions about the Left’s playing a leading role in the
foreseeable future [in the struggle for civil rights]. Leadership belongs to the
Negro community, and it is unlikely for some time to come to have any strong
conscious leftward tendencies. . . . It follows that adherents of the Left should
be the best and most loyal workers in such organizations as the NAACP and
the Southern Conference Educational Fund, not with a view to taking them
over or making their policies but for the purpose of helping them achieve the
aims they have set for themselves.
—Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Meaning of Little Rock,”
Monthly Review, December 1957
DOCUMENTS ?
The Nabi Papers*

‘ISADOR NABI’
Introducing Isador Nabi

First consider the last lines of Jonathan Swift’s “Ballad in a Bad
Temper”:
Like a boatman on the Thames

I row by and call them names.
Like the ever-laughing sage
In a jest I spend my rage.
But it must be understood,
I would hang them if I could.
The “them” in question in Swift’s time was the English monarchy,

but each of you can provide your own them. The verse serves as well
as anything as an introduction to the works of Isador Nabi.
Isador Nabi is widely believed to have emerged from the swamps of
southern Vermont some time in the 1970s. The first written record of
him was a short-lived biography in American Men of Science. Then he
seems to have dissolved. But it is said that he is a sort of academic
Golem and that whenever greed, obscurantism, careerism, reduction-
ism, and opportunism afflict science, that is, most of the time, he con-
denses again out of hypothetico-deductive dust in some obscure vault
in that library where they bury unread dissertations, and he lurks in
and around academia spending his rage in jest. An unsuccessful obitu-
ary appeared in Nature in 1981. Since then he has been nominated (by
himself) eleven times for the Grammy and his works have been retrans-
lated into English from 116 foreign languages that didn’t want them.
Frequent speculation in People Magazine has attempted to link his
name with professors at a major northeastern university, but with
* Isador Nabi is a product of the imaginations of RICHARD C. LEWONTIN and
R ICHARD L EVINS , most recently the authors of Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical
Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (Monthly Review Press, 2007). Lewontin is
reaearch professor in biology at Harvard. Levins is the head of the human ecology pro-
gram at the Harvard School of Public Health.
54
D O C U M E N T S ? 55
Clintonesque candor both Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin

have separately denied being identical to Isador Nabi.
We do not sympathize with the American obsession with celebrity
and will not contribute to further speculation since, after all, by his
works ye shall know him.—I. NABI

Isador Nabi Associates, Headhunters, S.A.*
Isador Nabi Associates is the leading senior-level employment ser-
vice in the Cosmos.
Among our previous successes:
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we found a prestigious career for the ne’er-do-well son of a Texas
oilman.
And now we have the most challenging mission in our company’s
history:
A major UniverseTM is seeking a new Intelligent Re-designer.
When the current incumbent’s contract expires on January 1, 3006,
we have it on the Highest Authority that it will not be renewed be-
cause of numerous design deficiencies. These include but are not lim-
ited to:
cutting of corners by multi-tasking of molecules in the name of
cost-effectiveness, as in the unfortunate use of testosterone in both
reproductive maturation and aggression, and the dual use of estro-
gens for fertility and bone density;
making alcohol more toxic to the conquered than to their con-
querors;
forgetting to include a birth canal in nematodes so that the young
have to eat their way out of their mothers in order to leave home;
the irrationality of the square root of 2;
an excess of beetles.
The present Intelligent Designer will be reassigned to a circuit

court of appeals judgeship or a visiting professorship at a major
northeastern university.
*This is a new genre. The opposite of the infomercial that disguises a commercial as
a news or independent opinion piece, this is an editorial disguised as a commercial.
The new staff designer will be expected to rectify past errors

retroactively and to satisfy the following among other design criteria:
qualify the Ten Commandments to include the appropriate excep-
tions when national security is involved and to create a more busi-
ness-friendly moral environment;
raise the freezing point of water so that the glaciers will unmelt;
make chocolate chip cookies cholesterol- and sugar free;
cancel the death of Jimmy Hendrix;
part the waters of the Caribbean Sea to swallow up hurricanes.
Applicants must be at least seven years old, have successfully com-

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strate a proven record of fund raising.
The contract will run for 10,000 years, renewable. There is no
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cannot provide health care. What do you expect, miracles?

The Plastic Solution: The Carbon Sink of the Future
An Objective and Confidential Science Bulletin from E 2, Economy
and Ecology, a Consortium of Major Construction, Plastic, and Re-
tail Corporations
NabTec, the research wing of Nabi Enterprises has come up with

the solution to global climate change that makes emissions control
unnecessary and reconciles ecology with the economy.
It is widely known that the world’s forests are being depleted.
And as they burn they dump their carbon into the atmosphere and
oceans and provoking climate change. Yet reforestation is not the an-
swer. It would harm the economy, infringe on property rights, and
might even lead to a plague of ivory-billed woodpeckers. We at
NabTec, and especially its research director, Isador Nabi, believe that
the solution is right before your eyes in the dumpsters, landfills, and
supermarkets of this greatest of all nations: plastics.
Plastics are, after all, polymers of carbon with some other things
tagged on. They are durable, malleable, and colorfast. Whereas a
good rainforest may store up to 100 tons of carbon per hectare, there
is no limit to the capacity of plastic forests. They can be taller than
D O C U M E N T S ? 57
redwoods, more branched than elms, shaped to reflect the original

vegetation of a region, and colored to serve the mood needs of the
population. The famous Black Forest can be replaced by the Pink and
Teel Forest to lift the spirits of the German people, while somber
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come groves of mega-lichens of polyester over Styrofoam snow fields
and even the most arid regions can be lush, colorful forests suitable
for the tourism, eco-tourism, and polymero-tourism that poor coun-
tries especially need. Plastibergs can restore the polar seas to their
pristine beauty and the best artists of the world can compete in the
design of new coral reefs.
The energy for the production of the plastics can come from fossil
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the atmosphere with the carbon dioxide needed for plastics produc-
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REVIEW
Reclaim the Neighborhood, Change the

World
V I J AY P R A S H A D
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of

the Urban Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 448
pages, hardcover $27.95.
In 1988, the National Urban League reported, “More blacks have lost
jobs through industrial decline than through job discrimination.” For a
civil rights organization, this was a remarkable observation. Born in the
era of Jim Crow racism, the Urban League championed the aspirations
for upward mobility among urban African Americans. When banks re-
fused to lend money to black entrepreneurs or when municipalities
failed to service the black community, the Urban League intervened.
One of the demands of the Urban League was for public goods to be
shared across racial lines. While the organization was not on the front-
lines of the civil rights struggle, it would have been a major beneficiary
of the movement’s gains. But the tragedy of the civil rights struggle was
that its victory came too late, at least thirty years late. Just when the
state agreed to remove the discriminatory barriers that restricted non-
whites’ access to public goods, the state form changed. Privatization and
an assault on the state’s provision of social welfare meant that it was not
capable of providing public goods to the newly enfranchised citizens. At
the same time as the state retreated from its social welfare obligations,
the industrial sector in the U.S. crumbled in the face of globalization.
Industrial jobs, once the backbone of the segregated black communities,
vanished.
The weakening of racism in the housing market meant that African
Americans with some means moved out of the enclaves of black life. The
sociologist William Julius Wilson places tremendous analytical weight
on this middle-class migration out of the ghetto, which became then an
VIJAY PRASHAD teaches international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
His latest book is The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York:
The New Press, 2007).
60
R E V I E W 61
incubator of what Wilson called “ghetto-related behaviors” (such as

substance abuse, violence, and gang organization). Wilson’s allowances
for the roots of behaviors could lead either to Michael Harrington’s 1962
concern for the “culture of poverty,” which would be ameliorated when
economic conditions were bettered, or else to Daniel Patrick
Moynihan’s 1964 “tangle of pathology,” which saw such social outcomes
as intrinsic to black culture. With the shifts in the U.S. economy,
Moynihan’s thesis was cheaper and more attractive to the ruling class:
the “underclass” needed to be managed, either by sealing their enclaves
through effective policing or else through migration of these populations
into prison. During the Clinton administration (1993–2001), the number
of those supervised by the correctional system increased from 4.5 mil-
lion to 6.4 million, with a disproportionate number being African
American. By the midpoint of the Bush administration, the number
reached 7 million, that is, 1 in 32 U.S. residents are either on probation,
in jail, or on parole. In 1996, Wilson gestured to the central reason for
this rise in incarceration, “A neighborhood in which people are poor but
employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor
and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neigh-
borhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social orga-
nization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disap-
pearance of work.” Wilson’s argument, which echoed Harrington’s, was
not heeded by his own advisee, President Clinton.
Those who must live in enclaves where jobs have disappeared must
forge their own means of survival. These “disposable Americans,” as the
New York Times’ Louis Uchitelle calls them, are neither subject to any
state-led policy for employment generation nor are they visible in the
academic literature devoted to the “underclass.” The assault on welfare
and the degraded conditions of life for those who were once on some
state support has, however, produced the only vibrant literature on this
class—and it has come, in the main, from feminist sociologists, histori-
ans, and political scientists. Sociologists, who write about the African
American populations who live in endemic poverty, apart from those
who write on welfare from a feminist standpoint, tend to do their work
with government statistics rather than with the people themselves. This
is why Sudhir Venkatesh’s book is so refreshing. Venkatesh, who stud-
ied with Wilson, knows his numbers. But he knows the people as well.
His new book, Off the Books, is an empathetic, and unromantic, docu-
mentary of the lives of people in one Chicago neighborhood. Going be-
hind the image of the “underclass” as exemplary of anomie, Venkatesh
finds out not only how the disposable Americans survive, but also by
what framework of rules they play. To survive, those with few means
turn to economic activity that is on the borderland between licit and il-
licit, from selling homemade food to selling secondhand guns—all of
which is, as Venkatesh’s central metaphor goes, off the books. This off-
the-books activity, which is ubiquitous, is not without its order, for
“there are always rules to be obeyed, codes to be followed, and likely
consequences of actions.” The matrix of social order is not governed by
the law. As Venkatesh put it, “The Southside residents must differenti-
ate between those who harm and those who annoy, between those who
make a little money on the side and those who jeopardize the commu-
nity, recognizing all the while that they may be the trader one day and
the one passing judgment the next. The judgments are not easy, nor
made lightly, for dollars are scarce, times are hard, and compromises
must be made if life is to go on.”
Venkatesh does his analysis through a conflict over a public park and
a commercial street in the heart of his Southside Chicago neighborhood,
Marquis Park. In 1999, when the cocaine trade went into a slump, and
as the city of Chicago condemned the nearby Robert Taylor Homes, a
gang, the Kings, moved into the neighborhood in force. To compensate
for the slowdown of drug profits, the gang extended its hustle into the
shady parts of the neighborhood’s economy: the gang imposed a tax on
off-the-books trade. But this hustle was not simply exploitative, for, “as
the gangs began moving into underground economies—drugs, larceny,
extortion—they became ‘corporate’ entities, organized to support the
material as well as the social needs of young people.” Problems occurred
when the gang brought its activities into the full light of the public park:
merchants, the preachers, and street hustlers as well as home workers,
bristled at this exertion.
Off the Books uses this conflict to delve into the lives of those who
work from their home and from the streets, the small merchants, the
churches, and the gang. These are the main actors of Venkatesh’s world.
It is easy enough to see how those who work and those who trade func-
tion in the borderlands with those who extort. But what about those
who pray? How do they fit in? “The shady world,” Venkatesh writes,
“provides a place to locate goods and services for congregants, includ-
ing (but not limited to) quick sums of cash, jobs, and access to credit
and financing. Like their flock, pastors must also contend with the com-
plexities of life where the underground may be the only available re-
source.” Venkatesh skillfully shows how these various social groups re-
R E V I E W 63
late to each other, in a world where resources are scarce and the state
has simply become a repressive entity. He brings to bear the entire so-
ciological apparatus, concepts such as social capital for example, to ex-
plain how a neighborhood is able to flourish in its own way despite be-
ing considered a cesspool by the rest of society. Such an account resem-
bles what Mike Davis calls a “government of the poor.”
If the “ordered environment” of Marquis Park is only viable in the
short term, as Venkatesh points out, then what is the long-term dy-
namic of this unemployed, off-the-books, working-class community?
What are its prospects for social change? The preachers and the mer-
chants are able to hold the fabric together with their tattered authority,
and the street and home workers collude with them as long as they are
able to make a living alongside gang activity. But none of these actors
hold the promise of a new world nor, in Venkatesh’s account, do they
seem interested in fundamental change. Do they possess historical agen-
cy—the ability and desire to advance a transformative agenda?
In American Project, Venkatesh’s book on the Robert Taylor Homes,
he describes a number of people’s organizations, or, as two residents
call them, mama’s mafias (such as Mothers on the Move Against Slums).
Residents, mainly women with children, seized their homes just as the
Argentine workers took control over their factories: the latter to recu-
perate abandoned factories and the former to revive their lived environ-
ment. The Robert Taylor residents, mostly without the kind of jobs that
are unionized, prevented the decline of their projects by self-organizing
its functions (such as running the elevators by “elevator committees”).
Cathy Blanchard, one of the mothers, told Venkatesh, “By us watching
over our kids, we learned how to fight to get what we deserved, you un-
derstand me. We marched with our kids to the police station, we went
to the alderman, we yelled at garbage truck drivers, we learned we
couldn’t just sit back ’cause they wouldn’t give us nothing. That’s what
got us fighting for our rights and that’s what got us involved in making
sure people had a decent place to live.” A few years later, the city of
Chicago demolished the Robert Taylor Homes. Blanchard’s energy is not
evident in the world of Marquis Park, where the people tend to turn to
the merchants, the priests, or the gangs to do their bidding.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis warns, “the future of human solidar-
ity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept
their terminal marginality within global capitalism.” This is true, but
how will it happen? Marquis Park, one such slum, shows us how cre-
ative people can be to survive, but not how they might lead a struggle
against the financialized world. By the end of Venkatesh’s book, the con-
flict over the park comes to a close. The preachers, merchants, and home
and street workers have tried to mediate their problems through regu-
lar meetings with the gang leader, Big Cat. The Kings, who are them-
selves interwoven into the community, are willing to make some small
concessions to the local gentry. Since community policing, the hallmark
of Clinton liberalism, failed to achieve its objective, this conclave en-
couraged the neighbors to come to a “community’s court,” where they
could get their grievances heard by the gang and the gentry themselves.
The main problems the people raised were the gang’s drug-trafficking in
public spaces and the gang’s extortion of off-the-books businesses. As
the story unfolds, and Big Cat loses control both of the community court
and his own gang, one feels the walls move in. The claustrophobic so-
cial world does not allow Ventakesh to valorize the shady economy, for
“the underground enables poor communities to survive but can lead to
their alienation from the wider world.”
In his new book on Katrina, organizer Eric Mann reminds us, “The
movement cannot advance by imagining new groups, new politics that
do not exist outside the actual class struggle.” Mann summons a new
generation of mature grassroots leaders to fight for a “Third
Reconstruction,” to roll back the neoliberal assault that rendered the
civil rights movement anachronistic, to re-envision the compact be-
tween the state and society. Even Marquis Park holds the potential, the
vitality of the people who are fed-up with the way things are. These are
a people in search of an organization capable of reclaiming their lived
environment and taking the small steps toward the transformation of
their world.
From time to time we receive bequests from readers who want to con-
tribute to the continuance of Monthly Review, Monthly Review Press, or the
Monthly Review Foundation. Those who wish to do the same may simply
state in their wills that the bequest is to “The Monthly Review Foundation,
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W, New York, NY 10001.” For additional infor-
mation contact Martin Paddio at 212-691-2555.

Political Islam: in The Service of Imperialism

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Scientific Satire from RICHARD LEVINS & RICHARD C. LEWONTIN²p.

Abu Ghraib &

in the service of imperialism

How Corporations Get Us to Work Without Pay

Reclaiming the ’Hood, Changing the World

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146 West 29th St., Suite 6W Editorial: mrmag@monthlyreview.org

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Political Islam in the

weaknesses of the organized left, which is absent from the spheres in

expressing my viewpoint in principle: the progressive response cannot be

ture is possible in these regions as elsewhere, but nothing is guaranteed

central theme of modernity. The left, be it radical or even moderate,

much more important than the parliamentarianism of Westminster, for

supported Hamas at the beginning in order to weaken the secular and

(China) in an uncomfortable position of dependence for their energy

munists or not. It is they who mobilized the obscurantist forces of

ed front of national resistance (call it what you want) might even be

confront its opponent alone is not an acceptable option: it reinforces

pretext immediately put forward to justify unconditional alignment

ration of and point of departure for a change that ultimately must

This rationalization of punishment was central to the system of tor-

and his girlfriend Lynndie England want us to believe? If we would

despite the demands of the current operating environment against an

I am not concerned here with explaining legally why what hap-

structures that give epochs their peculiar individuality.

hate. This is “licentious power”; power that is motivated by desire,

There is a second very pronounced difference between punishment

for the freedom of their ideas. Indeed, when freedom of speech is

treatment....And within a couple hours a team of two JAG officers, JAG

This dialectic between the disempowered native and the “invader”

The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native

The Hobbesian culture of anarchy, imported into Iraq through the

ed in Central and Western Europe, and more systematically in

Other insidious examples include incidents when detainees were

placed in the segregation cell. Detainee will be put on the adjusted

In my opinion this passage links up with many arguments I have

nized by the American Enterprise Institute in March 2006. At this oc-

Citing a book by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson entitled

Suddenly, now that we have delved into the narratives constituting

makers and scholars seriously discuss how the behavior of Arab-

duties of scholars of contemporary Western Asia to record and cri-

16. “Mikolashek Report,” The Torture Papers, 635.

The expansion of the capitalist world economy, which accelerated af-

I first became interested in these issues when, in the mid-1980s, the

On the History of Imperialism Theory

In his illuminating survey, “The Imperialist World System: Paul

an imperialist country, and was immediately confronted by the armies

The Comintern’s View

It is precisely this [post–First World War] weakening of imperialist pres-

imperialist groups, that has facilitated the development of native capital-

Incidentally, this passage anticipates a point later made in the “de-

level because direct exploitation and unequal exchange leave them no

prador class, were appendages of the international bourgeoisie; they

industrial capitalism which would dislodge it from its positions of priv-

Bourgeois-Democratic Tasks, Proletarian Leadership

By the Fourth Congress this was more explicit:

While the 1928 “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the

Mao therefore referred to this as the new democratic revolution:

The principal bourgeois-democratic task, the axis of the entire rev-

Later Baran refers again to “the agrarian revolution—bound to form

ing replaced by neocolonialism, and this shift was being celebrated as

Rediscovering the History of